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 "invalid character in identifier". 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 (), "*"  *  key)                text =  """I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. "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. # # # """  analysis result =  text_analyzer (text) analysis_results (results) 

Answer 1

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:

>>> s='    values ​​=  list(analysis.values ​​())' >>> 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.