Odd characters in Sublime Text 2: `SOH` and `ACK`

Question

In converting old notes from org syntax to mmd, I used the Clean Text app to remove extra line breaks and non-unicode characters, and to convert to safe line-endings. When pasting the text back into Sublime Text 2, I noticed several odd characters. I don't really care too much about why they're there, I'd just like to know what the characters are, and if they're searchable using a regex?

Answer 1

They are control characters, they don't have a printable representation. I don't know how they ended up in your file.

In a regex, you can search for SOH with \u0001 and ACK with \u0006

Answer 2

I said I didn't care about the reason at the time. I did eventually find out what the problem was the next time this happened. Turned out it had to do with running a LaTeX auto-build tool in the background. It was already being compiled in one shell and hung due to an error. The next time I tried to compile, these control characters started showing up in my editor.

I no longer make assumptions about the number of processes I have running. ps aux | grep <whatever> is your friend.