! Text line contains an invalid character

Question

My Compiler gives hundreds of “invalid character” like this:

> !ltext line contains an invalid character pfdlatex
> 1.1

Can anyone please help me to solve this matter.

Welcome to TeX.SX! Have you entered any accented characters, such as é? If so, you need to use the inputenc package. Another possible cause can occur if you copy and paste text that includes symbols such as em-dashes — or curly quote marks “ ”. We can't really help any further without a minimal working example (MWE) (as already noted in the previous comment). — Nicola Talbot, Feb 26 '14 at 15:09
Please paste the code here that is producing the error @Horacio — subham soni, Feb 26 '14 at 15:24
If it's the first line, it's likely to be a so-called 'byte order marker', a special character used to show how Unicode files are saved. This is not really needed and is not understood by TeX: which editor are you using? — Joseph Wright, Feb 26 '14 at 16:55
Welcome to TeX.SX! Please add a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates your problem. It will be much easier for us to reproduce your situation and find out what the issue is when we see compilable code, starting with \documentclass{...} and ending with \end{document}. — Martin Schröder, Feb 27 '14 at 13:17
Related http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/84949/compiler-gives-hundreds-of-invalid-character-suddenly and latex-community thread. Note: use unicode editor with utf-8 encoding in editor. May be copy all .tex source and paste in newly created new-file.tex in editor with utf-8 encoding, Remove any .aux .log files and then compile. — texenthusiast, Feb 27 '14 at 14:17

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 26 '14 at 17:24

Make sure the file is in the encoding you are trying to use, and that the right \usepackage[...]{inputenc} (or whatever other magic is required) is at hand.

I've had cases where the .aux or other LaTeX-written files contained cruft from earlier runs, or just were plain corrupt, and gave symptoms as you describe. Starting with a clean slate might help.

! Text line contains an invalid character

1 Answers1