Is this a server or php issue? Or is it me going mad?

[ade234uk]

Don't know if that something do with a server issue / php configuarion, or it is something I am doing wrong.

Every so often the £ character is replaced with £ when I receive emails from webforms.

Also using the £ in html code produces ? on webpages.
Sometimes if you enter £ in the html code it produces ? on the webpage.

At first I thought it was a browser issue my end, but I tried this in IE as well and sometimes get this problem as well.

I am starting to wonder if this is a server character set issue or even php issue.

I know it sounds totally crazy. Also when I imported the database all £ character was replaced with ?

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this before?

[veridicus]

Yup, it's character set issues. I've run into this sorta thing too many times. First you need to see what's in your database. Is the table UTF-8? PHP doesn't exactly support UTF-8 or most other extended character sets, but sometimes if you don't manipulate the strings it doesn't break anything. Also check to see what your PHP files are saved as, because that's what the web server will send back and what the browser will try to interpret (even if your meta data says it's another character set).

Basically everything needs to line up with matching character sets. It can get complicated depending on the details of the situation. If I know my data should only have Latin-1 characters I'll sometimes run a script to clean the strings (basically replacing the binary in the string).

Maybe someone else can give more suggestions for your particular situation.

[ade234uk]

Ok I checked the same database on the old server it is running with UTF-8 Unicode (utf8) The same as this server.

However I never experienced this problem with the other server, so this must have something to with php on this server?

[veridicus]

Did you move databases? Did you use mysqldump to do it? Because I've had UTF-8 character issues when using mysqldump (actually I think the import read the text file as latin-1). If you are moving the database try moving the raw table files.

Your problem is probably not the PHP installation itself. If a database move isn't the issue, what character set are your PHP files saved in?

[ade234uk]

Yes I did do a mysqldump to do it. Strange thing is it also happens with .php docs where there is no database interactivity.