MySQL or PHP is appending a  whenever the £ is used

Question

Answers provided have all been great, I mentioned in the comments of Alnitak\'s answer that I would need to go take a look at my CSV Generation script because for whatever r

Answer 1

In PHP, another small scale solution is to do a string conversion on the returned utf8 string:

print iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', "Mystring â"); //"Mystring "

Or in other platforms fire a system call to the inconv command (linux / osx)

http://php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php#83238

Answer 2

£ is 0xC2 0xA3 which is the UTF-8 encoding for £ symbol - so you're storing it as UTF-8, but presumably viewing it as Latin-1 or something other than UTF-8

It's useful to know how to spot and decode UTF-8 by hand - check the wikipedia page for info on how the encoding works:

• 0xC2A3 = 110 00010 10 100011
• The bold parts are the actual "payload", which gives 10100011, which is 0xA3, the pound symbol.

Answer 3

To remove a  use:

$column = str_replace("\xc2\xa0", '', $column);

Credits among others: How to remove all occurrences of c2a0 in a string with PHP?

Answer 4

Thanks a lot. I had been suspecting mysql for being currupting the pound symbol. Now all i need to do is wherever the csv record is generated, just use wrap them incov funciton. Though this is a good job, I am happy, at least someone showed exactly what to do. I sincerly appreciate dislaying the previous and the new 'header' values. It was a great help to me.

-mark

Answer 5

If you save line "The £50,000 Development Challenge" in two different data type column i.e. "varchar" & "text" field.

Before i save i have replaced the symbol with html equi value using following function. str_replace("£", "£", $title);

You will find that value stored in text fields is &pound where as in varchar its "£".

Answer 6

What you're seeing is UTF-8 encoding - it's a way of storing Unicode characters in a relatively compact format.

The pound symbol has value 0x00a3 in Unicode, but when it's written in UTF-8 that becomes 0xc2 0xa3 and that's what's stored in the database. It seems that your database table is already set to use UTF-8 encoding. This is a good thing!

If you pull the value back out from the database and display it on a UTF-8 compatible terminal (or on a web page that's declared as being UTF-8 encoded) it will look like a normal pound sign again.