Re: [Gretl-users] Mysterious error with a simple subtraction
On Wed, 9 Mar 2016, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Ok, I think I found the solution -- this is stuff more suitable for
the devel list instead of the users list, but in order to finish
this thread properly I'll post it here.
But first let me note a difference between running gretl in English
and in German: When I switched to English gretl gave me a "syntax
error" here, where in German there was nothing. So that might be
something that needs fixing irrespective of the other thing.
The underlying problem was a wrong character. The minus sign in:
"series tully = tul2an - tucpn"
was actually not a minus sign or hyphen character, but was the en-dash
character [...]
In fact we have a mechanism in place for reporting that sort of thing,
but it wasn't quite clever enough. The gretl code called for printing
"Invalid character <byte>". However, the first byte of the unicode
endash is not a valid UTF-8 character, so pango, which insists on
valid UTF-8, suppressed the message! (Using gretlcli at the command
line the message would show up, with a question-mark in place of the
bad byte.)
We now (git, snapshots) check to see if the bad byte is printable, and
if not we instead say, "Unexpected byte 0xwhatever", using its hex
representation.
Allin