[R] the invisible question

[Jim Lemon]

Hi all,
I have encountered a problem in some emails with invisible characters
in code snippets that throw an error when pasted into the terminal
window:

Error: unexpected input in:
"star_wars_matrix<-matrix(box_office,nrow=3,byrow=TRUE,
�"

This morning, after two hours of intense frustration, I found that I
could reproduce this by typing code containing the above line into
Kwrite, the text editor I use. When I pasted the code from Kwrite, it
worked in the R terminal window. When I pasted it into a gmail message
(set to Plain Text), copied that and pasted it into the R terminal
window, I got the error. I was helping a young friend with one of
those introductory R courses, but I have had this happen with other
requests on the R help list. I thought that it was the fault of the
fancy formatting in some emails, and could grumpily blame that, but
this is worse as I can't seem to edit it out. Anybody else had this
problem? I have sent a message to Gmail help.

Jim