I believe it’s the tab character.
Thats is used on Object Vars
ie: $wpdb->get_results or $userdata->ID
i don’t think that is right. here is a line of code where this operator is used:
$metavalues = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM $wpdb->usermeta WHERE user_id = ‘$user_id'”);
The “->” operator is a PHP construct to allow access to a particular Class’s methods/properties.
In the case you’re talking about, the wpdb class provides a method called get_results that accepts a SQL query string and will return it’s result.
If any or all of this makes no sense to you, and you are not very inclined to learn about PHP programming, you can safely ignore it. 🙂
Regards