getting errors stray ‘\342’ and ‘\200’ and ‘\214’ [duplicate]

Answer 1

Apart from what was said you have also one more error related to using variable player_choice outside its scope.

while ( more )
{
    cout << "enter C to cooperate, D to defect, Q to quit\n";
    char player_choice;
    // other stuff
}

if ( player_choice == 'Q' )
{
    cout << "Game is Over!\n";
    more = false;
}

It was defined in the while loop before the code snippet above and was destroyed after exiting the loop. So using it in this if statement is illegal.

Answer 2

cin >>‌ a;

I've copy-pasted that into Python and found out that between >> and the following space there are 3 characters: \xe2 \x80 \x8c. Decode them as UTF-8 and you get a ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER.

How it got into your code, I don't know. Find it out. Anything interesting about the editor you're using? Your keyboard layout?

Answer 3

You are using a Zero Width Non Joiner character after the >> in your code. This is a unicode character that is encoded in UTF-8 as three characters with values 0x2e, 0x80, 0x8c (or in base 8, \342, \200, \214). This probably happened because you copy and pasted some code from a document (html web page?) that uses those special characters.

The C++ language require that the whole program uses mostly the ASCII encoding, except for the content of strings or character literals (that may be in a implementation-dependent encoding). So to fix your problem, make sure that you only use simple ASCII space, quotes, double quotes and not smart characters.

Answer 4

I copy pasted your code snippet, completely unmodified, and found that you have a seriously funky space character after cin >>. Look below:

Get rid of the <200c>, and you should be able to compile just fine. Depending on the editor you're using, you may or may not be able to see it printed like this.