How come special characters become malformed when creating tokens via the API?

Hello Marketo Community,

I've been experiencing issue around character encoding (my application encodes in UTF-8 prior to inserting into Marketo) with characters being lost.

I've tried to follow this example and even ran the exact call noted in the "support" doc:

Using Extended Character Sets in API Calls

// snippet of code that pushes the new token (swapped with the Marketo example as the value.)
// output expected: 'Hello émarketo' output seen: "Hello émarketo"
parsed = requestJSONPush({url:requestUrl,params:{method:'post',payload:'folderType=Program&name='+programData[n][1]+'&value='+'Hello+%C3%A9marketo'+'&type='+programData[n][3]+''}});
// end

Any guidance or help would be appreciated

Thanks,

Edwin