[PHP] Replacing £ with £ in a string.

[UndeadDragon]

I have been making a simple CMS for someone for their website, but I have hit a problem, where when he tries to insert a £ symbol into page, it updates it correctly in the database, but when it tries to display on the website, it gives a strange ? symbol.

I have tried using:

$contents = $row['contents'];
$new = htmlentities($contents);
echo $new;

That works, but it also changes all the other tags when it is used, so I can see all square brackets etc.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[enouwee]

What about making sure that you're using the same encoding everywhere (i.e. UTF-8)?

 

[UndeadDragon]

I have:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

If that's what you mean.

 

[enouwee]

And what about the more important stuff, like the webserver, PHP, database?

 

[UndeadDragon]

PHP supports utf-8. MySQL database was in latin... something, so I changed it it utf8-bin, but that still doesn't work.

 

[enouwee]

Yes, PHP somehow manages to get UTF-8 right if you try hard enough. "It does not work" is not a valid problem description though and reduces your chances of getting any helpful answer at all. So, try your posting your coding instead.


But there's something much more "funny"... you changed the database encoding? Just like that, like ... modifying a configuration option? You did convert the existing data, didn't you?

If not, I hope your database didn't contain any useful data because you've just created a really big mess. What data did you use to carry out your tests? Rows that were present before you switched to UTF-8 or after doing so?

 

[UndeadDragon]

No, the database did not contain any useful data. Lucky really, as I just seen that it wasn't too good for the data in the database when I converted it. I didn't know it would do anything to the data

If I re-enter the data will it sort that out?

And if you want to know what the problem, the site is here. The problem is the supposed-to-be pound signs in the Call Outs box.

 

[enouwee]

As long as no data has been modified or added (especially if it contained non-ASCII characters), you can switch back, but do so ASAP.

EDIT: as for your special characters, just change your <meta> Content-type to iso-8859-1 and the characters will display just fine ... as long as you don't need eastern language support or other extended characters.

 

[UndeadDragon]

That works great, thanks enouwee.