extra slashes in <pre> tags

This is sort of an odd problem, but I’m using pre-formatted text tags to display source code examples and whenever these example include a single quote, the information is published with as:

\”

See: https://www.shiffman.net/teaching/programming-from-a-to-z/week-1-a-to-z/ for what I mean. . .

I don’t have this problem with flat HTML. . . perhaps I need to do some kind of fancy hack with stripslashes()?

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. . .

Thanks!