illegal rune literal

Problem : While writing out Go codes for tutorial today I came across this error message for the first time :

illegal rune literal

Diagnostic :

Based on the error information spitted out by the compiler. It pointed the fault to line 3:

 import (
 'fmt'
 )

From the first glance everything seems to be ok and not sure why Go compiler refused to compile the code. Initially I taught it was a bug in Go compiler which reported the wrong line of code. But upon closer inspection ..... it has something to do with the single quote around 'fmt'

Solution :

Apparently, the compiler insisted on using double quote " instead of ' to wrap around fmt for all the packages to be imported properly.

Changing to "fmt" solved the issue once and for all. The illegal rune literal error just magically disappeared.

Sometimes, the error message spitted out by Go can be vague ... such as illegal rune literal . Perhaps in future, the error message could be refined further to add more detailed description.

Reference :

https://codereview.appspot.com/6448137