CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsyntax-errorquotesquotequotation-marks
Brisanth
Brisanth

Reputation: 13

Syntax error on opening quotation mark

I'm trying to run a script for exercise 3.3 in the book Think Python:

Problem: Python provides a built-in function called len that returns the length of a string, so the value of len('allen') is 5. Write a function named right_justify that takes a string named s as a parameter and prints the string with enough leading spaces so that the last letter of the string is in column 70 of the display.

I've worked a few kinks out of script so far and right now I have this:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

def right_justify(s):
    print ‘ ‘ * (70 - len(s)) + s

right_justify(‘allen’)

and when I try to run it I get the following error:

 File "/Users/Jon/Documents/Python/Chapter 3/right justify.py", line 5
    print ‘ ‘ * (70 - len(s)) + s
          ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

What mistake did I make and what should I do to fix this script?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 6457

Answers (2)

Aaron Hall
Aaron Hall

Reputation: 395145

The character you're using 

print ‘ ‘ * (70 - len(s)) + s

is a non-ascii apostrophe, and while you can use unicode literals in your code, you can't use them for single quotes. You need the ascii single quote, ', (also sometimes used as an apostrophe),

print ' ' * (70 - len(s)) + s

or a double quote:

print " " * (70 - len(s)) + s

Upvotes: 0

user2555451
user2555451

Reputation:

The ‘ character is unrecognized by the parser. You need to use either apostrophes or quotation marks (' or ") for string literals:

print ' ' * (70 - len(s)) + s

For more information, see Strings literals in the documentation.

Upvotes: 3

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