[R] the invisible question

[Jim Lemon]

Hi again,
I finally trapped the character (hexadecimal C2 capital A hat) with
some low trickery.

Jim

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 10:07 AM Jim Lemon <drjimlemon using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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