Invalid character error while running terraform init, terraform plan or apply

I've encountered this problem myself in several different contexts, and it does have a common solution which is no fun at all: manually typing the code back in...

This resource block seems to be where it runs into problems:

resource "azurerm_virtual_machine" "example_windows_vm" {
  name  = "${var.resource_prefix}-VM"
  location = azurerm_resource_group.example_rg.location
  resource_group_name = azurerm_resource_group.example_rg.name
  network_interface_ids = [azurerm_network_interface.example_nic.id]
  vm_size = "Standard_B1s"
  delete_os_disk_on_termination = true

  storage_image_reference {
    publisher = "MicrosoftWindowsServer"
    offer     = "WindowsServerSemiAnnual"
    sku       = "Datacenter-Core-1709-smalldisk"
    version   = "latest"  
  }

  storage_os_disk  {
    name                 = "myosdisk1"
    caching              = "ReadWrite"
    create_option        = "FromImage"
    storage_account_type = "Standard_LRS"
  }

  os_profile {
    computer_name  = "hostname"
    admin_username = "adminuser"
    admin_password = "Password1234!"
  }

  os_profile_windows_config {
    disable_password_authentication = false
  }

  tags = {
    environment = "Test"
  }
}

Try copying that back into your editor as is. I cannot see any problematic characters in it, and ironically StackOverflow may have done you a solid and filtered them out. Literally copy/pasting it over the existing block may remedy the situation.

I have seen Terraform examples online with stylish double quotes (which aren't ASCII double quotes and won't work) many times. That may be what you are seeing.

Beyond that, you'd need to push your code to GitHub or similar so I can see the raw bytes for myself.

In the off-chance this helps someone who runs into this error and comes across it on Google, I just thought I would post my situation and how I fixed it.

I have an old demo Terraform infrastructure that I revisited after months and, long story short, I issued this command two days ago and forgot about it:

terraform plan -out=plan.tf

This creates a zip archive of the plan. Upon coming back two days later and running a terraform init, my terminal scrolled garbage and "This character is not used within the language." for about 7 seconds. Due to the .tf extension, terraform was looking at the zip data and promptly pooping its pants.

Through moving individual tf files to a temp directory and checking their validity with terraform init, I found the culprit, deleted it, and functionality was restored.

Be careful when exporting your plan files, folks!