Almost certainly a botched attempt to fix Unicode code points showing up in text.
For instance, the Euro symbol (U+20AC) is encoded in UTF-8 as the three bytes E2 82 AC. In Python (and other languages?) this can sometimes be misencoded as the 9-char string `\xe2\x82\xac`. The leading '\x' is a special sequence in Python to indicate a hex value.
Someone who didn't know what they were looking at might try to do a couple of heavy-handed replacements on article text to undo this. '\xe' is commonly seen in bad utf8 -> ascii translations because of how utf8 encodes code points.
For instance, the Euro symbol (U+20AC) is encoded in UTF-8 as the three bytes E2 82 AC. In Python (and other languages?) this can sometimes be misencoded as the 9-char string `\xe2\x82\xac`. The leading '\x' is a special sequence in Python to indicate a hex value.
Someone who didn't know what they were looking at might try to do a couple of heavy-handed replacements on article text to undo this. '\xe' is commonly seen in bad utf8 -> ascii translations because of how utf8 encodes code points.
See the specific Euro example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Examples
And a popular answer on StackOverflow specifically on '\xe2' in python output: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21639275/python-syntaxer...