$chr(160) is normally a blank character on most fonts (not all, for example System shows it as block) - I use it so that I can sent blank lines for pasting text documents with spaces between paragraphs in them and mostly just because other clients could do it (like XChat).
As for the symbol, I would love to be able to to add support for this, but I just couldn't get it to work - maybe somebody here can help me out with that.
btw you don't need this:
set %awayvalue 1
if (%awaynow == on) {
set %awaynow off
set %awayvalue 1
scon -at1 away
}
Because it's part of my auto-away script