Is RStudio editing scripts upon saving? - r

Question

I am reading pdf files with R. Before I analyze them, I perform a cleaning process.
More specifically, I am using this custom function:
cleanFile = function(x) {
x = str_replace_all(string = x, pattern = "\\s+", replacement = " ") # not interesting for this post
x = str_replace_all(string = x, pattern = "–", replacement = "-")
}
The second line is replacing a special character which my pdf files contain and looks just like a hyphen, with the "normal" hyphen character, "-".
This is some code afterwards:
pdfClean = lapply(pdfList, cleanFile) # files cleansed
str_detect(pdfClean[[1]], "–") # checking if the special character appears - this last bit is not part of the script, I type it in the console so it's not affected by save.
When I save and run my script, the last line surprisingly returns TRUE.
I understand that the "–" character has been replaced with something different, because if I replace it back in my code and run the same script without saving, the last line returns FALSE, as expected.
Furthermore, this issue has only appeared now that I have changed my computer. In the past, I was using a different one and my code was running without any issue whatsoever.
I tried to experiment a bit with Tools --> Global Options --> Code --> Saving --> Default text encoding, but I didn't manage to fix anything.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.