Question

I’m using Code::Blocks on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). I have connected a Mac keyboard and set the keyboard settings to "Swiss German Mac". Now whenever I write an equals sign, followed by a space (something like width = 100) I get the error message: stray ‘\302’ in program.

I know this error means that there is a non-standard character in the text file.

When I delete the space character, the program compiles just fine. So that means Code::Blocks adds some sort of special character. But I can’t see why this happens. What is the reason?

What character does ‘\302’ stand for?

[UPDATE]

I got a little further investigating the problem. I get this stray when I use the combo Shift + Space. Now that I know it doesn’t happen that often any more. But it’s still rather annoying especially when writing code… Is there a way to turn off this combo in X11?

[SOLVED]

Thanks to Useless’s answer, I was able to solve the "issue". It’s more of a feature actually. Shift + space created a spacenolinebreak by default. So by changing the xmodmap with

xmodmap -e "keycode  65 = space space space space space space"

this behavior was overridden and everything works fine now.

Answer 1

Since you’re sure it’s caused by hitting Shift + Space, you can check what X itself is doing by. First, run xev from the command line, hit Shift + Space and check the output. For example, I see:

$ xev
KeyPress event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x2000001,
    root 0x3a, subw 0x0, time 4114211795, (-576,-249), root:(414,593),
    state 0x0, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x2000001,
    root 0x3a, subw 0x0, time 4114213059, (-576,-249), root:(414,593),
    state 0x1, keycode 65 (keysym 0x20, space), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " "
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " "
    XFilterEvent returns: False
...

Then, run xmodmap -pk and look up the keycode (space should be 65 as above, but check your xev output).

If you see something like

65         0x0020 (space)

Then X isn’t doing this. On the other hand, if I pick a character key which is modified by shift, I see something like this:

58         0x006d (m)      0x004d (M)

If you have two or more keysyms for your keycode, X is the culprit. In that case, something like xmodmap -e 'keycode 65 space' should work.