Blame it on (a) Americans in general and (b) Bill Gates as a confounding factor.
What you have probably fallen foul of is "smart quotes", where the word processor substitutes distinct open and close quote marks when the quote is preceded/followed by a space. Unfortunately, because of short-sighted (a), Ascii only has one quote mark, so (b) used 8-bit coding to get round this and other inconveniences of people WHO DON'T SPEAK AMERICAN.
If you edit DO files with a word processor, save them explicitly as "text only" and ignore the warning that features will be lost. They are presumably the features that stop it working.
Americans now, those from Texas in particular, are much more sympathetic to those who use other languages.
Allan
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 11:22:25 -0700
From: "Seligman, Hilary" <[email protected]>
Subject: st: quotation mark format change causes invalid syntax error
I have come across a very basic problem I am unable to solve. I have a
long do-file labeling all my variables. In the middle of the file, the
way the quotation mark looks on the screen changes for some reason (it
looks like the quotation marks are a different font, although the font
of the letters are actually the same). This happens in the middle of a
line. Here is the line where the change begins:
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