Thanks to Carl, David and Susan for their advice.

According to Wikipedia, it is the symbol for a logical *not* gate. Unicode
U+00AC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negation

The weird part was that I pasted the content directly into R-gui from Gmail
and only had issues with extra line breaks (end of a comment on the next
line sort of stuff, not invisible new lines).

When I pasted it into the script editor to fix the comments and then
copy/pasted back to R-GUI, that's when the characters popped up. This is
why I emailed, because they weren't there until I edited in the script
editor. Unless they were there and they weren't in a position that would
cause an error and I messed that up by editing it.

Sadly, I've retraced my steps and I can't replicate it this morning. It's
almost like it happens randomly or just when I need to get things done. :/

I've downloaded TextWrangler and I'll Zap Gremlins before pasting into
R-GUI if I have a problem in the future.

Thanks All.

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Gruber, Susan <sgruber@hsph.harvard.edu>wrote:

> It's also easy enough to remove that symbol with the built-in  editor in
> the R GUI.
>
> Paste the code into a document. Even though that character is invisitble,
> it is there. In my experience it has been in the first column on each line.
> I copy that character (even though it looks exactly like a blank space)
> and using the Find command under the Edit menu item  use "replace all" to
> replace every occurence with a blank. (paste in the character where it says
> "Find", and type a space where it  says "Replace with:"  Then click the
> "replace all" button.)
>
> --Susan
>
> On Aug 29, 2012, at 5:43 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
>
> >
> > On Aug 29, 2012, at 1:13 AM, Brandon Hurr wrote:
> >
> >> I've been noticing lately some weirdness in the editor when copying
> >> and pasting code.
> >>
> >> Last night when I was trying to run some code from the ggplot2 mailing
> >> list I pasted the code in from gmail. As usual, there were extra line
> >> breaks that caused the code to fail.
> >>
> >> I pasted the code into the script editor to fix the line breaks and
> >> then copy/pasted it into R-GUI. I then got a lot more errors than I
> >> did previously, all of which were caused by the insertion of an
> >> invisible "Ź" symbol (a logical not).
> >>
> >> Here: https://plus.google.com/116319893425910717496/posts/5Yxkk7GFwts
> >> is a screen shot.
> >>
> >
> > I have had similar problems with stuff copied from web postings and
> generally solve them by pasting first into an editing session with
> TextWrangler and using it's sanitizing functions, Zap Gremlins, IIRC. I
> first tried to delete them with TextEdit.app but they proved remarkably
> persistent.
> >
> >
> >> The code in question is from this question:
> >> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ggplot2/BxSDoDjJgSA
> >> ... but this has happened before a few times (I cannot recall when it
> >> started, recently... perhaps since installing ML, but maybe before
> >> that). If I hit up to input the previous previous command the "Ź" are
> >> not there and when I search in the editor for this symbol nothing is
> found.
> >>
> >> Is there something going on with the editor or the clipboard or ...?
> >> Where should I be looking?
> >>
> >> Brandons-MacBook-Air:~ bhurr$ system_profiler SPSoftwareDataType
> >> Software:
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > David Winsemius, MD
> > Alameda, CA, USA
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac@r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
>
>

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