On Tue, 5 Dec 2006 12:37:48 -0000, "Chris Dean" wrote:

>  I was just wondering if anyone knows why php's utf8_encode
>  function converts the £ symbol into �£

   Yes. The '£' character is a two-octet sequence
in UTF-8. The problem is that you are viewing it
as if it were encoded in ISO-8859-1 (or similar).
These are the octet sequences for the characters
involved:

  Character    ISO-8859-1  UTF-8
  -----------  ----------  -------
  £ (pound)    <a3>         <c2 a3>
  Ã? (A-circ.)  <c2>         <c3 82>


In other words, you are seeing the two characters
<c2> <a3> instead of the one character <c2 a3>.
The fact that <a3>  appears in both encodings is
nothing more than an interesting coincidence.


Example (right):

  <?php
    header ('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
    echo utf8_encode ("\xa3");
  ?> 

Example (wrong):

  <?php
    header ('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1');
    echo utf8_encode ("\xa3");
  ?> 


--nfe

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