Special Characters in Smaug

I am using Smaug 1.4 and using area editor to build my zones. For some reason i cannot use characters like "~" or "^". The "~" are not allowed by area editor and if i change it in-game the ~ shows up as a -. when i use ^ they are just dont show up in the right spots... i was wondering if ther was some sort of code snippet somewhere that allows for special characters.. maybe some special characters on the ascii character map. like ♥ and such.. any help would be appreciated :)

Gradius
Head Administrator/Builder
Lands of Genesis
66.118.225.154:4000

Both those cannot be used, because ~ represents an end of the string, and ^ lets the string continue to multiple lines. I've seen a MUD or two with special characters, such as a Godwars MUD. Not sure how to do it though.

If you look at the code that reads in the area files, it delimits the description (for a room, say) with the ~ character, so clearly you can't have that in the middle of a room description.

Using the &#blah; approach would work, if the player was using MXP, however you would be in trouble if they are not.