Comment by geographomics

It does appear to be some encoding issue relating to the Unicode "→" (U+2192). Encoded with UTF-8, this is represented by the three bytes 0xE2 0x86 0x92. In the TeX EC encoding, these correspond to "âĘŠ".

(See https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb11-4/tb30ferguson.pdf, also section 2.3 of http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/doc/encguide.pdf)