Stray '\342' in C++ program

Question

I\'m getting these errors in my program after pasting in some code:

showdata.cpp:66: error: stray ‘\\342’ in program         


        

Answer 1

The symbol ” is not ". Those are called 'smart quotes' and are usually found in rich documents or blogs.

Answer 2

The lines

 size_t startpos = str.find_first_not_of(” \t”); 
 size_t endpos = str.find_last_not_of(” \t”); 

have some "special" kind of double quotes, try the following:

 size_t startpos = str.find_first_not_of(" \t"); 
 size_t endpos = str.find_last_not_of(" \t"); 

Answer 3

It is worth mentioning here (for whoever lands on this page just like me) that this sort of error message error: stray ‘\xyz’ in program can appear with any other character or symbol that is not recognized by the compiler as a legal one.

Sharing my personal experience:

 - bool less<const char∗>(const char∗ a, const char∗ b)  
 - bool less<const char*>(const char* a, const char* b)   

Former one is copy-pasted from a PDF file. It doesn't compile..

Later one compiles as expected.

Answer 4

You can use the sed command to fix these issues.

This will give you a quick preview of what will be replaced.

sed s/[”“]/'"'/g File.txt

This will do the replacements and put the replacement in a new file called WithoutSmartQuotes.txt.

sed s/[”“]/'"'/g File.txt > WithoutSmartQuotes.txt

This will overwrite the original file.

sed -i ".bk" s/[”“]/'"'/g File.txt