Latin Capital A with circumflex preceding a pound symbol.

**Andy Hassall** · Feb 2 '06, 10:15 PM

Re: Latin Capital A with circumflex preceding a pound symbol.

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:35:22 GMT, junk@junk.com wrote:
[color=blue]
>Sorry if this has been asked before, and apologise if this is the
>wrong NG.
>
>I am using PHP 5.0.5 and Apache 2.0.54 in a Win2k environment.
>
>Lately I have been playng with RSS feeds. I managed to get "lastRSS"
>which is a simple RSS parser.
>
>When I tried to setup an RSS feed to eBay to get custom searches
>straight to my desktop I noticed that the UK Pound sterling symbol is
>shown preceded by a Latin capital A with circumflex. (An 'A' wearning
>a hat).
>
>I checked the RSS feed and the extra char is not there.
>
>So, I am unsure how to progress to sort this out. I don't know if PHP
>or apache is the problem. I can only find one other comment on Google
>where someone is having the same problem. But still no answer.
>
>I checked the changelogs for the lastest versions of PHP and Apache
>and there is no mention of this bug.
>
>Is it just me?
>
>Any clues will be much appreciated.[/color]

First thing to consider is the encoding - what encoding is the RSS feed in? As
it's XML, the most common encoding is UTF-8.

What did you check the RSS feed with? If you used a browser or a half decent
editor it would most likely have understood the encoding and presented the
character correctly.

But your PHP code may be trying to treat UTF-8 as single-byte ISO-8859-1.

A British pound symbol is two bytes in UTF-8 - it's U+00A3 which is 0xC2 0xA3
in UTF-8.

Unicode Character 'POUND SIGN' (U+00A3)

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00A3/index.htm

POUND SIGN, U+00A3, pound sterling, sterling pound, lira italian, irish punt, italian lira, POUND SIGN, punt irish

If you tried to display this as ISO-8859-1 you'd get:

0xC2 = Latin capital A with circumflex
0xA3 = British pound symbol

ISO/IEC 8859-1 - Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1

--
Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.u k :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool

**junk@junk.com** · Feb 4 '06, 09:05 AM

Re: Latin Capital A with circumflex preceding a pound symbol.

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:00:17 +0000, Andy Hassall <andy@andyh.co. uk>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:35:22 GMT, junk@junk.com wrote:
>[color=green]
>>Sorry if this has been asked before, and apologise if this is the
>>wrong NG.
>>
>>I am using PHP 5.0.5 and Apache 2.0.54 in a Win2k environment.
>>
>>Lately I have been playng with RSS feeds. I managed to get "lastRSS"
>>which is a simple RSS parser.
>>
>>When I tried to setup an RSS feed to eBay to get custom searches
>>straight to my desktop I noticed that the UK Pound sterling symbol is
>>shown preceded by a Latin capital A with circumflex. (An 'A' wearning
>>a hat).
>>
>>I checked the RSS feed and the extra char is not there.
>>
>>So, I am unsure how to progress to sort this out. I don't know if PHP
>>or apache is the problem. I can only find one other comment on Google
>>where someone is having the same problem. But still no answer.
>>
>>I checked the changelogs for the lastest versions of PHP and Apache
>>and there is no mention of this bug.
>>
>>Is it just me?
>>
>>Any clues will be much appreciated.[/color]
>
> First thing to consider is the encoding - what encoding is the RSS feed in? As
>it's XML, the most common encoding is UTF-8.
>
> What did you check the RSS feed with? If you used a browser or a half decent
>editor it would most likely have understood the encoding and presented the
>character correctly.
>
> But your PHP code may be trying to treat UTF-8 as single-byte ISO-8859-1.
>
> A British pound symbol is two bytes in UTF-8 - it's U+00A3 which is 0xC2 0xA3
>in UTF-8.
>
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...00A3/index.htm
>
> If you tried to display this as ISO-8859-1 you'd get:
>
> 0xC2 = Latin capital A with circumflex
> 0xA3 = British pound symbol
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1
>[/color]

Ahh. I realize that my knowledge in this area is somewhat lacking.
After some more digging (and googling) I now come to the unfortunate
realisation that I made a mistake.

To fix my problem I simply needed to add :
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
to the <head> section of my HTML page.

I now understand that this is not a PHP problem at all, and I
apologise for suggesting such.

Thanks to Andy for pointing me in the right direction.

Regards
Nick

Latin Capital A with circumflex preceding a pound symbol.

Latin Capital A with circumflex preceding a pound symbol.

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