subtraction is giving me a syntax error

[John Machin]

On Mar 16, 5:43 am, Baptiste Carvello <baptiste... at free.fr> wrote:
> Joel Pendery a écrit :

> > So I am trying to write a bit of code and a simple numerical
> > subtraction
>
> > y_diff = y_diff-H
>
> > is giving me the error
>
> > Syntaxerror: Non-ASCII character '\x96' in file on line 70, but no
> > encoding declared.
>
>
> I would say that when you press the minus key, your operating system doesn't
> encode the standard (ASCII) minus character, but some fancy character, which
> Python cannot interpret.

The likelihood that any operating system however brain-damaged and in
whatever locale would provide by default a "keyboard" or "input
method" that generated EN DASH when the '-' key is struck is somewhere
between zero and epsilon.

Already advanced theories like "used a word processor instead of a
programmer's editor" and "scraped it off the web" are much more
plausible.

> More precisely, I suspect you are unsing Windows with codepage 1252 (latin 1).

Codepage 1252 is not "latin1" in the generally accepted meaning of
"latin1" i.e. ISO-8859-1. It is a superset. MS in their wisdom or
otherwise chose to use most of the otherwise absolutely wasted slots
assigned to "C1 control characters" in latin1.

> With this encoding, you have 2 kinds of minus signs: the standard (45th
> character, in hex '\x2d') and the non-standard (150th character, in hex '\x96').
>
> cf:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc195054.aspx

The above link quite correctly says that '\x96` maps to U+2013 EN
DASH. EN DASH is not any kind of minus sign.

Aside: the syndrome causing the problem is apparent with cp125x for x
in range(9)