Mermaid error

Curly quotation marks do not quote a label

Reproduced on Mermaid 11.17.2 · Updated 11 September 2026

Curly quotation marks do not quote a label in Mermaid. The exact parser message, why it happens, and corrected source that renders.

What Mermaid says

Parse error on line 2:
...wchart TD  A[“Cost (USD)”] --> B[Review
----------------------^
Expecting 'SQE', 'DOUBLECIRCLEEND', 'PE', '-)', 'STADIUMEND', 'SUBROUTINEEND', 'PIPE', 'CYLINDEREND', 'DIAMOND_STOP', 'TAGEND', 'TRAPEND', 'INVTRAPEND', 'UNICODE_TEXT', 'TEXT', 'TAGSTART', got 'PS'

Why it happens

A word processor or chat client replaced straight quotes with typographic ones. Mermaid only recognises the straight double quote, so the label is still unquoted and any bracket inside it breaks the line.

The source that fails

flowchart TD
  A[“Cost (USD)”] --> B[Review]

How to fix it

Replace the curly quotation marks with straight ones.

flowchart TD
  A["Cost (USD)"] --> B[Review]

The corrected source, rendered with Mermaid 11.17.2.

Next steps

Paste your own version into the Mermaid repair tool, which applies this correction and fourteen others and shows every change. The related page covers the surrounding syntax, and the error dictionary lists every message.