php display 8-bit ascii character "tm"

[Anon]

I could use some help displaying 8-bit ascii characters in my php code.

I cannot display the ™ character ( if you machine can't display the character it is the "TM" or trademark character) which has an ascii code of 153 dec or 99 hex and has an html equivalent of ™
The character gets displayed as ¿ (again if your machine can't display, it's an upside-down question mark) which has the ascii value of 191 dec or BF hex.

So, instead of displaying the text as:
My Name™
What I actually see is:
My Name¿

Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Some info about the environment:
I don't have php compiled with the imap stuff (and I don't think I can get it changed).
These characters are in a database that I cannot change either (so I can't convert them to the html equivalents).
My client is IE 5 on windows 95 pc.
The server is running Solaris 2.6 and the web server is Apache 1.3.12 with php4.0.4pl1.
I'm using the oci8 driver in my php code.
I'm reading data from an oracle 8.1.6 database.
In my env I have NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1.

This problem occurs with phplib DB_sql class with (table.inc)
or with adodb using tohtml.inc.php.

BTW:
On the server there is a java servlet (apache with mod-jserv) that can display the character correctly.

Thanks,
Mick
[e-mail]

[kparker]

Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

What's wrong with saying ™ which renders as ™?

Ugly or not, this is the official way to do it, according to w3c.
I surely would have thought a readable, meaningful name along
the lines of & for & would have been more to
the point, but what to I know? :-)

[kparker]

Hmm, it seems phpbuilder is eating something here, because if I do a View Source I see the little superscript tm, and also if I add the numeric html entity to a local html file and view it, I see the superscript tm, but on the actual page I get the same black block you do.

It's still odd about the method, since ® probably gives the right thing: ®

[Anon]

It appears this is really a browser font-rendering problem. I switched over to IE 5.5 (on the same workstation) and lo and behold not only does the numeric entity display properly (&#8482😉 but so does the name-based one (™&trade😉.

[Anon]

Kirk,
Thanks for your feedback.
I tried various browsers including Netscape 4.7, 6, IE 5.0, IE5.5 and Opera (all on Windows platforms) and the tm character looked the same to me on all of them.
I guess I'll have to try to get the DB updated to subsitute the tm special character with ™ ( & t r a d e ; )

However, I'm still going to try and figure out how to get that character to work.
Maybe I need to try different NLS charset options or maybe there is a string helper function or class that can decode it.

Anyway, thanks again,
Mick