Pound Signs appearing as Question Marks PHP

Question

I'm having problems with Pound Signs appearing as Question Marks within a diamond in my PHP script which pulls data from a MySQL Database.

I have looked through other Stack Overflow answers and I think checked everything.

I have checked in php.ini that I have default_charset = "utf-8", I have also added AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and to /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/charset.conf

I have also added this to the top of the web page:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<HEAD>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>ZXDB</title>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

Finally I ran sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart to restart the server.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 with Apache and PHP7.

What am I missing?

The page is available here:

http://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/originalprices.php

Thank you in advance

look in the DB and see what charset it uses for the table, you may have to change it to that charset. — ArtisticPhoenix, Sep 10 '16 at 19:08
In theory, if you don't mind case sensitive searches. Usually seeing a black diamond with a question mark is a charset issue. — ArtisticPhoenix, Sep 10 '16 at 19:20
Do you mean the currency pound or the `#` pound sign ... lol ... this may be helpful http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3565801/gbp-pound-symbol-appearing-as-uknown-char-in-shop — ArtisticPhoenix, Sep 10 '16 at 19:21
In the database the field is showing as £9.99 in the webpage I get the £ in the black diamond the 9.99 — Peter Jones, Sep 10 '16 at 19:25

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 11 '16 at 11:38

Thanks everyone for their answers. Even though the database, the table and the field were all set as UTF-8, when I checked the Character set with this:

http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.set-charset.php

It said it was Latin, so I fixed it with adding this to my PHP

mysqli_set_charset($conn,"utf8");

Where $conn is your connection string

Peter

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

Is £ showing up as a single �? If so, see "Black diamond" in https://stackoverflow.com/a/38363567/1766831 . That says:

Case 1 (original bytes were not UTF-8):

The bytes to be stored are not encoded as utf8. Fix this.
The connection (or SET NAMES) for the INSERT and the SELECT was not utf8/utf8mb4. Fix this.
Also, check that the column in the database is CHARACTER SET utf8 (or utf8mb4).

Case 2 (original bytes were UTF-8):

The connection (or SET NAMES) for the SELECT was not utf8/utf8mb4. Fix this.
Also, check that the column in the database is CHARACTER SET utf8 (or utf8mb4).

Black diamonds occur only when the browser is set to <meta charset=UTF-8>.

Pound Signs appearing as Question Marks PHP

2 Answers2