Invalid character in identifier

Question

I am working on the letter distribution problem from HP code wars 2012  I keep getting an error message that says  quot invalid character in identifier quot   What does this mean and how can it be fixed  Here is the page with the information  import  string  def  text analyzer text      The text to be parsed and the number of occurrences of the letters given back be  Punctuation marks  and I ignore the EOF simple  The function is thus very limited           result           Processing     for  a in  string ascii lowercase      result  a     text lower     count  a        return  result   def  analysis result  results      I look at the data     keys    analysis keys        values  u200b u200b   list analysis values  u200b u200b        values sort  reverse   True      I turn to the dictionary and   Must avoid that letters will be overwritten     w2           list             for  key in  keys          item    w2 get  results  key   0           if  item      0               w2  analysis results  key       key          else               item append  key              w2  analysis results  key      item    We get the keys     keys    list  w2 keys         keys sort  reverse   True         for  key in  keys          list    w2  key          liste sort            for  a in  list              print  a upper      quot   quot      key                 text     quot  quot  quot I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed   quot We hold these truths to be self-evident  that all men are created equal   quot I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be Judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character         quot  quot  quot   analysis result    text analyzer  text  analysis results  results

User · Answer

A little bit late but I got the same error and I realized that it was because I copied some code from a PDF  Check the difference between these two  -  - The first one is from hitting the minus sign on keyboard and the second is from a latex generated PDF

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Similar to the previous answers  the problem is some character  possibly invisible  that the Python interpreter doesn t recognize  Because this is often due to copy-pasting code  re-typing the line is one option  But if you don t want to re-type the line  you can paste your code into this tool or something similar  Google  quot show unicode characters online quot    and it will reveal any non-standard characters  For example  s      values      list analysis values         becomes s      values U 200B U 200B      list analysis values U 200B U 200B         You can then delete the non-standard characters from the string

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Carefully see your quotation   is this correct or incorrect  Sometime double quotation doesn   t work properly   it s depend  on your keyboard layout

User · Answer

This error occurs mainly when copy-pasting the code  Try editing replacing minus -   bracket    symbols

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I got that error  when sometimes I type in Chinese language  When it comes to punctuation marks  you do not notice that you are actually typing the Chinese version  instead of the English version  The interpreter will give you an error message  but for human eyes  it is hard to notice the difference  For example   quot   quot  in Chinese  and  quot   quot  in English  So be careful with your language setting

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I got a similar issue  My solution was to change minus character from       to -

User · Answer

My solution was to switch my Mac keyboard from Unicode to U S  English

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Not sure this is right on but when i copied some code form a paper on using pgmpy and pasted it into the editor under Spyder  i kept getting the  invalid character in identifier  error though it didn t look bad to me  The particular line was grade cpd   TabularCPD variable  G     For no good reason I replaced the   with   throughout the code and it worked   Not sure why but it did work

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If your keyboard is set to English US  International  rather than English US the double quotation marks don t work  This is why the single quotation marks worked in your case

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You don t get a good error message in IDLE if you just Run the module   Try typing an import command from within IDLE shell  and you ll get a much more informative error message   I had the same error and that made all the difference    And yes  I d copied the code from an ebook and it was full of invisible  wrong  characters

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The error SyntaxError  invalid character in identifier means you have some character in the middle of a variable name  function  etc  that s not a letter  number  or underscore  The actual error message will look something like this     File  invalchar py   line 23     values    list analysis values                       SyntaxError  invalid character in identifier   That tells you what the actual problem is  so you don t have to guess  where do I have an invalid character   Well  if you look at that line  you ve got a bunch of non-printing garbage characters in there  Take them out  and you ll get past this   If you want to know what the actual garbage characters are  I copied the offending line from your code and pasted it into a string in a Python interpreter    gt  gt  gt  s      values      list analysis values         gt  gt  gt  s      values  u200b u200b   list analysis values  u200b u200b       So  that s  u200b  or ZERO WIDTH SPACE  That explains why you can t see it on the page  Most commonly  you get these because you ve copied some formatted  not plain-text  code off a site like StackOverflow or a wiki  or out of a PDF file   If your editor doesn t give you a way to find and fix those characters  just delete and retype the line   Of course you ve also got at least two IndentationErrors from not indenting things  at least one more SyntaxError from stay spaces  like     instead of     or underscores turned into spaces  like analysis results instead of analysis results    The question is  how did you get your code into this state  If you re using something like Microsoft Word as a code editor  that s your problem  Use a text editor  If not     well  whatever the root problem is that caused you to end up with these garbage characters  broken indentation  and extra spaces  fix that  before you try to fix your code

[python] Invalid character in identifier

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