Weird newbie question

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:05:57 -0500, Matty Sarro wrote:

> Hey everyone. I'm running into a funky error as I work through "Learn
> Python the Hard Way." What's weird is both idle and the python
> interpreter in idle spit out an error about syntax, but when I run the
> same script from the command line it works just fine, with no issue.

Either you are mistaken about it being the same script, or you have two 
versions of Python installed, Python 2.x and Python 3.x.

My guess is that you have two versions installed, and when you run IDLE 
you are running Python 3, and when you run the script from the command 
line you are running Python 2.


> I'm
> not sure if its an issue with IDLE or if I'm doing something wrong.
> 
> Here's the book's code:

Irrelevant. Unless you think that somehow your computer is running the 
code in the book instead of the code in your computer?


> Here's my code:
> 
> from sys import argv
> script,filename=argv
> txt=open(filename)
> print "Here is your file %r:" % filename
> print txt.read()
> print "I'll also ask you to type it again:" 
> file_again=raw_input("> ")
> txt_again=open(file_again)
> print txt_again.read()
> 
> 
> IDLE is saying that my error is on line 4, at the second set of
> quotation marks.

Line four is not the second set of quotation marks. It is the first set 
of quotation marks.

Please show the ENTIRE error displayed, including the full traceback, and 
not just the message. That is, everything starting from "Traceback (most 
recent call last)" to the end. Please copy and paste the full error, do 
not summarise or paraphrase it.


> Since I can't get the error from the command line,

Earlier you said that the script works correctly when you run it from the 
command line.


> I
> can't actually see what the syntax error is that it's complaining about.
> Any advice would really be appreciated, thank you!!

(1) Inside IDLE, type this:

import sys
sys.version

What does it show?

(2) Show us the exact command you give on the command line that 
successfully runs the script.


There may be more questions later, but this will do to start.



-- 
Steven