两个相同的PHP语句给出不同的结果？

Question

I was doing some coding on my phone when I got this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '"log.txt"' (T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING) in your code on line 15

This is the offending code:

 $file = "log.txt";

Note that you have to copy this exactly to get this result. This is because when I retype it:

$file = "log.txt";

I get no error. The two lines are the same, except for one thing: the second space in the line is binary "10100000" in the crashing statement, but "00100000" in the retyped one.

So I suppose my editor screwed up in some mystical way I will probably never discover. But what I don't get is why does this bad character look exactly like a space (as opposed to something else or a �), and why does it cause this particular error as if I didn't properly open my string?

Answer 1

It's a non-breaking space character.

It probably came about as a result of copying the code in from a blog post or from Word, for example.

The interpreter is not able to parse it as a regular space, hence the error.