Delphi – E2038 Illegal character in input file – ‘%s’

The compiler discovered an illegal character in Delphi program.

Errors with string constants or comments are the most common cause of this error message.

program Produce;

begin
  Writeln("Hello world!");   (*<-- Error messages here*)
end.

In this case, a programmer reverted to C++ conventions and quoted a string with double quotes.

program Solve;

begin
  Writeln('Hello world!');   (*Need single quotes in Delphi*)
end.

The solution is to use single quotation marks. In general, you should remove the illegal character.