This strikes me as something R would be particularly well suited for.
Base R has a number of tools for detecting and handling strings, including special characters. I use the Tidyverse's stringr for these types of operations.
A good path forward would be to create a reproducible example of your data. I'd include in that example that has a few lines of the the special characters you are working with. That would make a great starting off point for folks here who'd like to offer suggestions. If you aren't familiar with reproducible examples, and setting up example data, here's a nice discussion with some options. (I often just use dput.)