Have you tried the verbatim
environment?
\begin{verbatim}
Your text here.
\end{verbatim}
Without knowing what your "weird symbols" are, it's difficult to suggest a solution to your problem.
Update: In order to embed a verbatim
environment in a table cell, you need to change the column to a paragraph column (using either p
, m
, or b
as the column specifier); e.g.
\begin{tabular}{|p{10cm}|}
\begin{verbatim}
Your text here.
\end{verbatim}
\end{tabular}
See Wikibooks for more information.