Encoding issue: £ pound symbol appearing as <?> symbol

Question

My database field is set to utf8_general_ci and my websites encoding is utf8.

The £ symbol is coming up as a black diamond with a question mark through the center.

Answer 1

Before communicating with your database, you need to send the query :

SET NAMES 'UTF-8'

It tells the database to use utf8 encoding for all queries on this connection.