I’m running OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan and have tried this from many different sources, including sublime text and Atom, and making sure that I’m really dealing with plain-text utf-8 files, and every time I get the same characters like in the original post. This really slows things down because I have to transcribe code snippets that I find online (including this forum). Pasting into the text editor first doesn’t make a difference. As I mentioned below, pasting into word kind of works-- it looks like it’s pasting the proper text, but when I try to run it I get errors about the ascii encoding.
Any progress on this would be much appreciated!