Why is the semicolon unrecognized when running this perl script?

Question

Code from text editor

Terminal Error.

I'm trying to set up Moss(stanford plagarism checker for CS), and when I run the script an error not recognizing semicolon in the script comes up?.

This is being run on Mac OSX using textwrangler as the text editor.

Unrecognized character \xC2; marked by <-- HERE after t_l = "c";<-- HERE near column 14 at ./moss.pl line 173.

Answer 1

It's not complaining about the semi-colon (which is 3B), it's complaining about a byte with value C2 after it. That's not legal ASCII (which is expected if you don't use use utf8;) though it might be the start of a legal UTF-8 sequence (which is expected if you do use use utf8;)

You don't see it in the terminal or in the editor either because it's also junk to them, or because they expect UTF-8 and it's (the start of) some kind whitespace or unprintable UTF-8 character.

It's likely a U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE, which UTF-8 encodes to C2 A0. This would appear as a normal space in a terminals and editors that expects UTF-8.

Retype the line to replace the NBSP with a normal space, or add use utf8; to have Perl to treat the source code as UTF-8.