qmake can't process project file on windows

[fullmetalcoder]

weird... I can't spot any obvious error in this project file so you may try :

• setting a value for the TARGET variable
• changing the line endings of the file (probably not a problem but who knows)
• changing the encoding of the file (same as above)
• regenarating your project using "qmake -project" and then adding statements (and checking after every addition if qmake fails to find the offending statement)

[s-troz]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'd tried everything but changing the encoding, however re-generating the file from scratch with qmake -project would cover that as well -- no matter what I did, I kept getting the same errors. Very weird, I know.

In case it was some crazy problem with Windows, I also tried again after rebooting (using my original project file and regenerating with -project), which, again, failed. Running qmake -d -d doesn't seem to show any errors, reading all the default config files (in C:\Qt\4.4.3\) goes fine, the last two messages are: Reading project file "C:\path\to\paintingeditor.pro" and "Error processing project file" i.e. the message from the first post.

[s-troz]

Good news! I found the problem! There was a single quote in one of the parent directory's name -- renaming that directory did the trick. Now that I think of it, I seem to recall possibly reading about this in the manual. I am a little surprised that I seem to be the only person whose ever had this problem, as multiple Google and forum searches (over different forums) returned absolutely nothing relevent.