How to convert a symbol - " † " to HTML code?

Question

I'm trying to write the dagger '†' symbol to a HTML page which gets converted to a PDF document, but this appears on the PDF as 'â€'

I understand that I need to use the HTML code for this symbol, which is †.

I've done this successfully for the '€' but in these cases I've written the code directly into the HTML. In this case, I'm reading the symbol from an XML file. When I inspect the value of the variable that contains the symbol, it appears as '†'.

I should note that I've tried reading the symbol & the code from the XML file, as follows:

<fund id="777" countryid="N0" append="&#8224;" />

and

<fund id="777" countryid="N0" append="†" />

but both are stored in the variable as the symbol, and when I write them to the page, both are rendered as 'â€'. Also, I've tried the following:

string code = "†";
string symbol = "†";
string htmlEncodedCode = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(code);
string htmlEncodedSymbol = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(symbol);

tc.Text = fund.Name + code + " " + symbol + " " + 
    htmlEncodedCode + " " + htmlEncodedSymbol;

but only the first works. It appears in the document as:

FundName† †† â€

Can somebody suggest how I can get this to work?

Update:

@James Curran's answer below was correct. Just for the sake of clarity, I had to change the XML to:

<fund id="777" countryid="N0" append="&amp;dagger;" /> 

and in my C#:

tc.Text = fund.Name + append;

Answer 1

This is an encoding issue. †is probably the Latin-1 representation of the dagger in UTF-8. Try converting the dagger from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1.

Answer 2

With the XML file what you probably want to do is something along the lines of:

<fund id="777" countryid="N0" append="&amp;#8224;" />

The reason is that the XML file will interpret the & as the & symbol and the rest as literal text. Thus in your html you will get † and that should do you.