Apple Automator Question Copy and Paste

As far as I know it is impossible avoid the copy of these weird characters. But you can remove them using an editor like TextWrangler. TextWrangler has an useful menu option "Text" -> "Zap gremlins".

This options identify and replace:

• Non Ascii characters
• Control characters
• Null (Ascii 0) characters

So, when I cannot avoid to copy from Skype (I suggest to use emails for important text) and I would be sure to remove all weird characters, better paste/zap/copy all the text within TextWrangler.

If having such characters in decomposed form (represented by two codepoints, base character plus combining accent mark) is a problem for further processing you need to do, then you can use an app like Unicode Checker to convert the text to Unicode Normalization Form C. That will change them into the composed, single-codepoint form.

http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/