My thought:
Set your 'funny characters' to variables, using concatenation $+( ) and
ASCII character numbers $chr(N).
set %xyz $+($chr(226),$chr(128),$chr(169),$chr(42))
You can get the ascii number with $asc(C)
In a table I have, it says the Euro symbol should be 164, but 128 was what I needed to use.
(Must be an old table?)