Mark Needham

Thoughts on Software Development

rspec – Invalid character '\240′ in expression

with one comment

We have been using rspec on my project for the unit testing of our Ruby code and while running one of the specs last week I ended up getting this somewhat en-cryptic error message:

Invalid character '\240' in expression
...

After convincing myself that this error wasn't actually possible it turned out that I had somehow entered an 'invisible to TextMate' character after one of the method definitions – on the editor it just looked like a space.

I'm not sure exactly what the character was but deleting it got rid of the error and got my test/spec running again.

Written by Mark Needham

October 6th, 2008 at 8:48 pm

Posted in Ruby

Tagged with ,

One Response to 'rspec – Invalid character '\240′ in expression'

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  1. Thank you!

    I have been sitting this this error for an hour now, wondering that the hell was wrong. Having recently played with different ruby version I obviously thought they caused it.

    David Billskog

    18 Nov 09 at 7:24 am

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