Python print in terminal returning 'invalid syntax'

Question

Im using the terminal on my mac to run some python and when i try to print a string i get an invalid syntax error.

Michaels-MBP:~ mike$ python text.py
File "text.py", line 2
print(‘hi’)
      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I've tried it with single quotes and with and without parentheses but i keep getting that error, what is wrong.

Answer 1

Should be:

print('hi')

You have proper British quotes 'foo' . Those are the right symbols to use when writing human-readable texts, but Python wants actual single quotes ' .

Your editor probably has some kind of smart-quotes feature enabled, it is wise to turn this off when writing code (eg configure your editor to detect extensions like .py ).