PHP UK £ symbol inconsistency

Question

I have 2 similar PHP pages, one displays the UK £ symbol correctly, the other displays a black diamond with a ? in it.

In order to diagnose the problem I cut the code down and they are now identical, but still display differently. How can that be??? This is the code `

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8">
</head>

<body>
<?php
echo '<p>';

echo "£"."123";

?>
</body>

</html>`

While working with the original code it seemed that I could fix one by removing the charset=utf8 but if I removed it from the other it prefixed the £ with a capital A with an accent.

What is happening here?

Your text encoding is in some way messed up. You're declaring `charset=utf8`. Make sure that your charset *really is* UTF-8. Check in your text editor. — TRiG, Feb 08 '16 at 16:13
Perhaps the actual files saved to disk with different encodings? — James Thorpe, Feb 08 '16 at 16:13
Look at the Content-Type (and Content-Encoding) **http** headers from your two servers. — Quentin, Feb 08 '16 at 16:13
Also, you can use `£` in your HTML instead of copying and pasting the pound sign itself — Misa Lazovic, Feb 08 '16 at 16:19
The two files are both on the same server. How can I check the encoding of the actual files? — Mick Sulley, Feb 08 '16 at 16:50

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

1

You have configured another charset in your apache configuration. Maybe your php are proccessed with ISO-8859-1 and you are defining in your HTML UTF-8. That's an inconsistency. Try to define UTF-8 in your apache configuration.

See this post:

How to change the default encoding to UTF-8 for Apache?

In httpd.conf add (or change if it's already there):

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Feb 08 '16 at 16:14

Marcos Pérez Gude

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I have added AddDefaultCharset utf-8 to httpd.conf and rebooted, but the problem is still there. – Mick Sulley Feb 08 '16 at 16:49

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 20 '17 at 16:26

1

The reason the issue was occurring was that the PHP files were saved with different encoding. The one which behaved okay had encoding UTF-8, while the problematic file had encoding Windows-1252. I use Bluefish and it all looked okay in there, but when I ran the cat command on the file I could see the odd character.

Thanks for your help!

edited Apr 20 '17 at 16:26

Sᴀᴍ Onᴇᴌᴀ

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answered Feb 08 '16 at 20:19

Mick Sulley

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PHP UK £ symbol inconsistency

2 Answers2