Re: How to Debug Parse Errors

[Erik Sandberg]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 21.58, Richard Grubb wrote:
> I am new to Lilypond. I have 1.6.0 running on MacOSX 10.1.5. I can
> create .ly files from descriptions in the tutorial and run them through
> ly2dvi, but have not been able to run the first two examples I saved
> from the lilypond.org website. When I run ly2dvi -P standchen.ly, I get
> the following output:
>
> error: parse error, unexpected $, expecting STRING or '}'

That one occurs to me too, sometimes. The problem is probably that you copied 
the file through the clipboard or something, and some of the spaces are 
actually some other kind of character which Lilypond treats as an illegal 
character (you can see that the characters are distinct from spaces if you 
run "less file.ly").

A solution is to replace all those spaces with normal spaces.

Erik