More likely shoddy unicode handling. I'd wager that the author intended for an emdash at that point (—). ... I was close. It's an en-dash. It's a triple of

More likely shoddy unicode handling. I'd wager that the author intended for an emdash at that point (—). ... I was close. It's an en-dash. It's a triple of bytes, in decimal representation: julia> b = UInt8[226, 128, 147] 3-element Array{UInt8,1}: 0xe2 0x80 0x93 julia> String(b) "–" julia> ans[1] '–': Unicode U+2013 (category Pd: Punctuation, dash)