I'm using Vim on Windows, and in order to "change" the vimrc file location I have just the following line in the _vimrc file that is in my home directory:
source $HOME\.vim\.vimrc
I thought everything worked just fine that way but when I tried changing the symbol for a plugin (tagbar) to a certain fancy one like this:
let g:tagbar_iconchars = ['▸', '▾']
the plugin symbol didn't show the glyph but a <br> character instead. I noticed that the same problem appeared when attempting to change the symbol in several other plugins (vimfiler, airline, etc) and found out that if I changed those symbols in the _vimrc file rather than in the new .vimrc file the issue was fixed.
Is there some encoding being set with the source command in the _vimrc file that is triggering my problem? I thought that "changing" the vimrc file location the way I did was fine, are there other problems with that method?