Retrieving £ from db, want to keep it in that format

[invision2]

Hi,

The following characters sometimes appear at the top of my web page: 
It seems to only happen when I'm trying to display the £ symbol on my website in Firefox. In front of each £ symbol it has a Â.

I've got the £ symbol stored in my database as £ do I need to do anything special to stop it converting to £ when on the web page?

Perfect world I'd want £ in my HTML rather than it being converted to £.

My charset is <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/ html;charset=utf-8" />


Thank you for any help.

[felgall]

Every & you want to display in your web page needs to be specified as &amp;

[invision2]

Yes, but I would like to also display &pound; in my web page, but Firefox seems to change it to £ when its coming from the db, which is giving me problems.

Would it be harmful to change my Charset from UTF-8 to something else?

Like I say, it's a fairly intermittent issue, but I'd prefer not to have it at all

[invision2]

Definitely seems to be a UTF-8 encoding issue.

I'm taking the value &pound; from my db and 99&#37; it displays the pound symbol fine, but sometimes it adds the &#239;&#187;&#191; to the top of my page and then &#194; in front of some of my &#163; symbols.

Has anyone found a fix for this?


I may have to just display the pound symbols client-side if there's no way around it.

[World Wide Weird]

Would it be harmful to change my Charset from UTF-8 to something else?

No. I always use ISO-8859-1 to avoid just such UTF-8 tomfoolery.

As felgall said, you have to use the HTML entity for ampersand in order to display an ampersand on a page:

& a m p ; p o u n d ;

(Remove the spaces.)

[invision2]

Aaaaaah, so even for &pound; I have to use &amp;pound; ???

I'm using UTF-8 just now, should I expect any major issues if I change my Charset?


Thanks for your help.

[World Wide Weird]

Aaaaaah, so even for &pound; I have to use &amp;pound; ???

Only if you want to display the entity code instead of the actual pound symbol. Otherwise, just use the entity code.

I'm using UTF-8 just now, should I expect any major issues if I change my Charset?

I've never had any problems with ISO-8859-1, whereas I've had the same problems you described with UTF-8.

[invision2]

Right. I want to display the &#163; symbol, so I'll just use &pound; or & # 1 6 3 ; ?

Sorry to ask again, but will I lose my valid XHTML if I change charset? All the data is taken from a MySQL database - do I need to make any charset changes there?
Apologies again for the sheer newbness of the query.

[World Wide Weird]

Right. I want to display the £ symbol, so I'll just use &pound; or & # 1 6 3 ; ?

Correct.

Sorry to ask again, but will I lose my valid XHTML if I change charset? All the data is taken from a MySQL database - do I need to make any charset changes there?
Apologies again for the sheer newbness of the query.

I've never had to make any changes to the MySQL or SQLite configuration in order to make retrieved text display properly. As far as I'm concerned, UTF-8 creates issues that wouldn't exist if UTF-8 didn't exist.

[invision2]

Wicked. Thank you. Will let you know 9am GMT how successful it was

Thanks again.

[felgall]

As far as I'm concerned, UTF-8 creates issues that wouldn't exist if UTF-8 didn't exist.

Which alternative to UTF would you suggest should have been used to define a characterset to hold the hundreds of thousands of different characters where the most commonly used ones can fit in one byte, the next most commonly used in two bytes, and the least used in four bytes?

[Stormrider]

You need to save the file out again with a different character set if you are going to serve it as such.

[World Wide Weird]

Which alternative to UTF would you suggest should have been used to define a characterset to hold the hundreds of thousands of different characters where the most commonly used ones can fit in one byte, the next most commonly used in two bytes, and the least used in four bytes?

I don't concern myself with the inner workings of character sets at all, to be quite honest. If I see random characters in my text editor and/or Web page that I didn't type myself and then discover that they go away when I change character sets, that is what I do. That done, I forget about the annoying distraction and get on with whatever it was I was doing. I am simply not interested in making things more complicated than they have to be.