£

I have a form that users can fill in and the content is displayed elsewhere as HTML. For this reason I use htmlentities() to encode any characters that need it. I'm having problems with the £ symbol which is coming out as £ . From Googling for "£" I can see that this is a common problem! I'm guessing it's to do with character sets but this is an area I have no experience in.

Can anyone advise?

Thanks,
Geoff

In general, if you see a capital A plus some accent followed by another character - that is, two characters when you expect one - it's a Unicode/UTF-* problem.

£ is Unicode 0xA3 or binary 0b10100011. This was encoded into two bytes using Unicode: the format is 0b110----10------.
With padded zeros, 0xA3 is 0b00010100011 which then fits into the two-byte pattern above as 0b1100001010100011, or 0xC2A3. This forms the character string £ that you see.

In other words, PHP's utf8_decode() function should fix the problem.

OK, so in the case of htmlentities() should I set the optional charset parameter to 'UTF-8'? Also, should I be adding a charset to the HTML form?

Thanks,
Geoff

I believe so, yes (to both): your HTML should specify a charset anyways.