hidden characters in source code causing compiler grief

[Keith Thompson]

I at a loss to fathom what is going on here.
I cannot imagine whence the pipe (| vertical bar character) entered
either the file in question or the conversation as I have followed it.

There isn't really a vertical bar character. With LANG=C, I find that
vi in xterm displays the NO-BREAK SPACE character (0xa0) as something
that looks like a boldface vertical bar followed by a space; I'm not
sure why.

[...]

Since this is really more about recovering a corrupted text file than
about C, I suggest taking to another newsgroup, perhaps
comp.unix.shell or comp.unix.questions.

 

[luserXtrog]

There isn't really a vertical bar character.  With LANG=C, I find that
vi in xterm displays the NO-BREAK SPACE character (0xa0) as something
that looks like a boldface vertical bar followed by a space; I'm not
sure why.

But then he says :%s/^V240//g doesn't work.

[...]

Since this is really more about recovering a corrupted text file than
about C, I suggest taking to another newsgroup, perhaps
comp.unix.shell or comp.unix.questions.

Agreed. I wash my hands of this.