Thank you, Jim, Peter, and John, for your help!   Turns out it is a "non-break space".  No idea how it got there (the file is from somebody else).  Thanks to Excel, I guess.

Tao




>________________________________
> From: John <jwd@surewest.net>
>To: r-help@r-project.org 
>Cc: "Shi, Tao" <shidaxia@yahoo.com> 
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 10:17 PM
>Subject: Re: [R] what's this character?
> 
>On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:44:59 -0800 (PST)
>"Shi, Tao" <shidaxia@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi list,
>> 
>> I've encounter this problem (see below).  I know it's particularly
>> R-related and it's easy to get by but it still bothers me a lot.  
>> 
>> 
>> It looks the last character of "N.C. " is a space to me, but it's
>> clearly not.  Can someone tell me a way to figure out what character
>> is in the last position.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> Tao
>
>In the sample you provide it is HEX 20 which is ASCII for "space."  So
>either, it really is a space, or it didn't copy in your message.  I
>would suggest copying the string and pasting into a hex editor. 
>
>Doing that with the "N.C. " from your message yields:
>
>22 4E 2E 43 2E 20 22
>
>The "20" is the ASCII "space" character.  Just possibly, if you are
>using a file saved in a unicode format, it could be a "no-break space"
>- Unicode point U+00A0, or UTF-8 "c2 a0".  Good luck.
>
>JWDougherty
>
>
>
>
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