The Quotation Problem

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Maybe this article gets the attention of a local optometrist or eye shop: I have a business opportunity for you! ;-).

I ran into a weird problem: I received an ARM GNU gcc project which failed during the generation of the S19 file in strange way:

'Executing target #80 Freedom_Zumo.siz'
'Invoking: ARM Ltd Windows GNU Create Flash Image'
“C:/Freescale/CW MCU v10.3\eclipse\../Cross_Tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc-4_7_3/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy”  -O srec Freedom_Zumo.elf "Freedom_Zumo.hex"
' '
Der Befehl "“C:" ist entweder falsch geschrieben oder
konnte nicht gefunden werden.
mingw32-make: *** [Freedom_Zumo.hex] Error 1

Interestingly, the error message is in German. I’m using a localized German version of Windows 8, so this message definitely was coming from the Windows operating system, and not from Eclipse or CodeWarrior?

Running the same project on a Windows with English local language returned the same thing, but in English:

'“C:' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
operable program or batch file.

So Windows cannot find

C:/Freescale/CW MCU v10.3\eclipse\../Cross_Tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc-4_7_3/bin/arm-none-eabi-objcopy

But checking my files, that file exists, and it is working for other projects?

Checking the project settings, and everything looked fine:

Project Settings

Project Settings

Well, until I had a *realy* close look at the Console view:

Double Quotes

Double Quotes

Ahrg! It is not using the straight (programmers) double quotes! And this is really hard to spot in the Eclipse project settings. At least for myself, I can hardly see the difference:

non-straight double quotes

Non-Straight Double Quotes

Straight Double Quotes

Straight Double Quotes

Changing the double quotes to use “..” solved the problem 🙂

Conclusions

  1. Always use ‘straight’ double quotes (“…”) (typewriter or programmer quotation marks) and not “..” .
  2. Be careful with copy-paste things from documents or web pages as they can use different quotation marks which will not work.
  3. Check the Console view output in case of strange errors.
  4. I might get a call from a local optometrist 🙂

Happy Quoting 🙂

5 thoughts on “The Quotation Problem”

    • Yes, it is definitely better to avoid spaces. Altough I think they get handled pretty well. But what is causing problems is anything which is not fitting into the 7bit ASCII code table, especially things like international characters like äöü and others: development tools and as well GNU gcc does not like it.

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  2. Countless times I have copied lines from one program source to another with the inserted code showing up buggy even though it worked in the original program. I don’t know how many hours of my life I have wasted because of this. Eventually, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, I simply delete and retype the line and it works fine.

    I have speculated that somehow a hidden control character got inserted.

    I now know where to look when this happens again.

    Your short post may be worth more than “its weight in gold”. 😉

    Thank you.

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      • Yes, me too!
        At work sometimes I paste a few lines of code into an Outlook email msg, to send it to somebody else, and then it won’t compile. Outlook changes the ‘-‘ chars to something it thinks looks nicer, and changes the double quotes to it’s fancy ones like Erich encountered.

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