I'm all for clear and helpful error messages, but this feels a tad too verbose (and even a bit patronizing) to me. But the highlighting of character look-alikes is very helpful. Perhaps something like: """ SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier -->2: print(“Squares:”) ^ An identifier contains one or more unallowed Unicode characters. It is likely the "curly quote" unicode quotation mark, rather than the required ASCII single or double quote was used for a string. """ I'm assuming that this would detect some of the common "look alikes" and give a specific suggestion as above. Keep in mind that anyone coding Python is going to see a LOT of SyntaxErrors -- we don't need to present a message as though they've never seen such an error before. But it IS helpful to point out errors that are hard to see with a glance at the code. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython