[Tutor] Re: number conversion problem (was: Re: [no subject])

[Danny Yoo]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 Dragonfirebane at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 6/8/2004 5:17:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> lsloan-000002 at umich.edu writes:
>
> > What do you expect the variable "char" to contain?  A single character
> > of the user's input string, one character at a time until you reach
> > the end of the string?
> >
> > If so, you're going to need a line like this somewhere just before you
> > reference "char":
> >
> >      for char in original:
>
> I tried this, and it wouldn't let me run the program and highlighted the
> closing quote as the culprit, claiming invalid syntax . . .


Hi Dargonefirebane,


Can you show us the exact error message?  The most common occurrence of
this error is due to mismatched quotes.


Here is one example of such an error:
###
>>> ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g', h']
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g', h']
                                    ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning single-quoted string
###


A missing quote character will do this.  And since the program has tables
full of string constants, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the entries
were mistyped.

Computers are much much better about seeing syntax problems than us
humans.  If the Python system claims that there's a SyntaxError, then it's
not just a claim: there IS a syntax error lurking somewhere in that
program.  *grin*


Going back to the comment:

> >      for char in original:
>
> I tried this, and it wouldn't let me run the program and highlighted the
> closing quote as the culprit, claiming invalid syntax . . .

When the 'for' loop was first introduced into the program, it's all too
easy to inadvertantly drop or introduce an extra quote.  One extra
character or one accidental backspace can do it.  Computer programs are
pretty finicky about details like this.  It may be a stupid syntax error
(like a missing quote), but that's something that's very easy to do, so I
wouldn't take it personally.


Try it again, and see if you get the same error message.  If you ever see
an error message that makes no sense, don't ignore it, but feel free to
show it to the folks on Tutor.