£ signs

Steve09 · 7 Oct 2009 at 19:36

On my PHP page, whenever I enter a £ sign in my code just to display it, it comes up like this:

When using the system and I enter a £ sign in the "Price" field, it saves it to my database like this:

Could you help me so I get the £ sign on both Webpage and database.

Thanks

fini · 7 Oct 2009 at 19:37

Looks like you're just using £. Try using £ instead

Steve09 · 7 Oct 2009 at 19:45

Thanks fini, it's fixed the display issue on the Webpage by using £ but in the database it's still showing that a before it, but $ sign works fine.

Before I put a fixed value in the text box of £, is there any way to sort it so the user can type the £ sign?

Thank you

Edit - Even with the £ as a fixed value in the text area, it's still showing that a in the database.

Lethal` · 7 Oct 2009 at 19:54

Do you actually need to store the pound sign in the database? It doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

You may have to change the encoding/collation to support pound signs, not sure which one you'll need though. Try utf8.

Steve09 · 7 Oct 2009 at 19:59

I'd like to display the £ sign in the database so when I call the information on another page, it'll show the price with the pound sign.
An alternative I suppose is to just store the value e.g. 5.99 then concatenate that on the end of a £ on my output page.

The collation is on utf8_generel_ci

Lethal` · 7 Oct 2009 at 20:02

Steve09 said:
I'd like to display the £ sign in the database so when I call the information on another page, it'll show the price with the pound sign.
An alternative I suppose is to just store the value e.g. 5.99 then concatenate that on the end of a £ on my output page.

I would recommend doing that, that way you don't have to remove the pound sign if you wish to perform any operations on the values. I expect it is bad practice to store it in the database, but I'm not certain

Russinating · 7 Oct 2009 at 20:13

Yup, bad practice to include the currency symbol with the cost. It means it's harder to do calculations and it's just generally not a good idea. Just include the £ symbol on output and if your site works across multiple currencies then link each cost to an ID with a list of IDs/symbols in another database.

fini · 7 Oct 2009 at 21:10

Or just do what electronics companies do and use a $1=£1 conversion rate and then it doesn't matter which sign you show

sist_si · 7 Oct 2009 at 22:03

utf-8 encoding would fix that particular problem. you can set it using a content-type header. There are also ways of fixing this in ASP code but I'm not 100% sure about PHP. I know in ASP you can programmatically set the content type and charset to UTF-8 and also use the 'Codepage' setting to ensure weird characters like this display correctly.

Berserker · 7 Oct 2009 at 22:53

I agree that UTF8 would fix that problem, but I see it as very bad practice to store prices as strings in a database, let alone with the currency sign attached. Prices are numbers, and should be stored as such whenever possible.

And yes, before someone jumps down my throat, I know they'll probably end up as strings in PHP/ASP/whatever, but that isn't the point.