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)