PHP Strange character before £ sign?

Question

For some reason i get a Â£76756687 weird character when i type a £ into a text field on my form?

Answer 1

As you suspect, it's a character encoding issue - is the page set to use a charset of UTF-8? (You can't go wrong with this encoding really.) Also, you'll probably want to entity encode the pound symbol on the way out (£)

As an example character set (for both the form page and HTML email) you could use:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

That said, is there a good reason for the user to have to enter the currency symbol? Would it be a better idea to have it as either a static text item or a drop down to the left of the text field? (Feel free to ignore if I'm talking arse and you're using a freeform textarea or summat.)

Answer 2

You’re probably using UTF-8 as character encoding but don’t declare your output correctly. Because the £ character (U+00A3) is encoded in UTF-8 with 0xC2A3. And that byte sequence represents the two characters Â and £ when interpreted with ISO 8859-1.

So you just need to specify your character encoding correctly. In PHP you can use the header function to set the proper value for Content-Type header field like:

header('Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8');

But make sure that you call this function before any output. Otherwise the HTTP header is already sent and you cannot modify it.