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Python Data Visualization with Bokeh Getting and Displaying Data Colors and Legends

Cody Stephenson
Cody Stephenson
8,361 Points

Solution to the "SyntaxError: Invalid Character in Identifier" you might get from the color_mapper code. [Feedback]

While trying to use the color_mapper code I got a "SyntaxError: Invalid Character in Identifier" error. I'm doing this course in a Jupyter Notebook so I'm not sure this will happen in other IDEs. When you copy and paste the code you get

color_mapper = CategoricalColorMapper(factors=[Asia, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Central America, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America], palette=[#00FF00’, ‘#FFD343’, ‘darkgray’, ‘brown’, ‘cyan’, ‘crimson’, ‘red’, ‘#0000FF’, ‘purple’])

and you can see that syntax coloring goes wonky part way through, which along with the error told me there is a character being misinterpreted. I checked for non-printable characters with repr() and to see if any of the color codes need to be escaped out for some reason. Eventually, I noticed that the issue seems to be curly ‘’ vs straight '' quotes.

I threw it in Sublime to find and replace all curlys with straights and got

color_mapper = CategoricalColorMapper(factors=['Asia', 'Africa', 'Antarctica', 'Australia', 'Central America', 'Europe', 'North America', 'Oceania', 'South America'], palette=['#00FF00', '#FFD343', 'darkgray', 'brown', 'cyan', 'crimson', 'red', '#0000FF', 'purple'])

Which makes the syntax coloring happy and resolves the error.

Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,423 Points

Thanks! Flagging as feedback.

Developers: Please update the teachers notes with corrected string quotation marks.

1 Answer

Ken Alger
STAFF
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Nice catch Cody Stephenson. Sometimes the various quotation marks definitely matter and the "smart quotes" get render in wonky ways.

Pleased to hear that you worked it out.