Invalid character in identifier

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The error SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier means you have some character in the middle of a variable name, function, etc. that’s not a letter, number, or underscore. The actual error message will look something like this:

  File "invalchar.py", line 23
    values =  list(analysis.values ())
                ^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

That tells you what the actual problem is, so you don’t have to guess “where do I have an invalid character”? Well, if you look at that line, you’ve got a bunch of non-printing garbage characters in there. Take them out, and you’ll get past this.

If you want to know what the actual garbage characters are, I copied the offending line from your code and pasted it into a string in a Python interpreter:

>>> s="    values ​​=  list(analysis.values ​​())"
>>> s
'    values \u200b\u200b=  list(analysis.values \u200b\u200b())'

So, that’s \u200b, or ZERO WIDTH SPACE. That explains why you can’t see it on the page. Most commonly, you get these because you’ve copied some formatted (not plain-text) code off a site like StackOverflow or a wiki, or out of a PDF file.

If your editor doesn’t give you a way to find and fix those characters, just delete and retype the line.

Of course you’ve also got at least two IndentationErrors from not indenting things, at least one more SyntaxError from stay spaces (like = = instead of ==) or underscores turned into spaces (like analysis results instead of analysis_results).

The question is, how did you get your code into this state? If you’re using something like Microsoft Word as a code editor, that’s your problem. Use a text editor. If not… well, whatever the root problem is that caused you to end up with these garbage characters, broken indentation, and extra spaces, fix that, before you try to fix your code.

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