Question

I’m getting IndentationError: unexpected indent even though I wrote the code exactly as shown in the book (Learn Pythhon the hard way)

I’m sure that I’m using exactly four spaces to indent the lines which come after "def".

I am using Python 2.7 on Windows 7.

Here’s the error I get in PowerShell:

PS C:\Users\Kiedis\python> python ex25.py
  File "ex25.py", line 3
    return sorted(words)
    ^
IndentationError: unexpected indent

And here are the first three lines of my code:

def sort_words(words):
    """Sorts the words"""
    return sorted(words)

Answer 1

You are mixing tabs and spaces anyway; run your script with:

python -tt ex25.py

to detect where the error lies.

Then configure your editor to only use spaces for indentation, and re-indent your file. See How does one configure Notepad++ to use spaces instead of tabs?