Compilation fails with "error: stray '\342' in program"

Question

(a) Define the class Book with all the basic attributes such as title, author, publisher, price, etc. Define the default constructor, member functions display_data() for displaying the Book details. Use appropriate access control specifiers in this program.

Output:

Line 16: error: stray '\342' in program
compilation terminated due to -Wfatal-errors.

Source:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

Class Book
{
    Int ISBNNo;
    Char Title[30];
    Char Author[30];
    Char pub[50];
    Float price;

    Public: Book()
    {
        ISBNNO = 1001;
        Strcpy(Title, ”C++ Programming”);
        Strcpy(Author, “E.Balagurusamy”);
        Strcpy(pub, “Tata Press”);
        Price = 300;
    }

    Void display_data()
    {
        Cout << ”Book ISBNNO” << ISBNNO << endl;
        Cout << ”Book Title” << Title << endl;
        Cout << ”Book Author Name” << Author << endl;
        Cout << ”Book Publisher” << pub << endl;
        Cout << ”Book Price” << price << endl;
    }
};

Main()
{
    Book B;
    B.display_data();
    getch();
}

Answer 1

You need to use a proper editor. You are using ” and not ". The former is a character which is not allowed in C++ source code, the latter is a regular double-quote.

If I see your code, it seems you are using a word processor suitable for writing regular text (like letters, articles, etc.). Note that source code is different and you need to use an editor. I, for example, use emacs, other alternatives are available. A (source code) editor would not try to replace the character you typed by something more appealing or capitalize words (which is I think happened for Void, Int, etc. - these need to be void, int, ...)

The C++ standard defines the allowed characters in §2.3:

2.3 Character sets [lex.charset]

¹ The basic source character set consists of 96 characters: the space character, the control characters repre- senting horizontal tab, vertical tab, form feed, and new-line, plus the following 91 graphical characters:¹⁴

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

_ { } [ ] # ( ) < > % : ; . ? * + - / ^ & | ∼ ! = , \ " ’

^{14) The glyphs for the members of the basic source character set are intended to identify characters from the subset of ISO/IEC 10646 which corresponds to the ASCII character set. However, because the mapping from source file characters to the source character set (described in translation phase 1) is specified as implementation-defined, an implementation is required to document how the basic source characters are represented in source files.}