It looks to me like it's a literal -h-> to be inserted into the target string, as part of the replacement text for a substitution. It's in the same part as $1 et al.

As far as I can tell, | (vertical bar) is the separator character for the substitution, and the leading s and trailing | are missing from the snippet.

In reply to Re: Strange regular expression syntax by chipmunk
in thread Strange regular expression syntax by nysus

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