Pound symbols not showing properly

Databases
1

Hi there,

I am trying to edit some code in a MySQL database.

The problem is with the ‘£’ symbols. They appear as a question mark in a black diamond shape. Previous problems like this were solved by deleting the pasted in text and writing it again. For example when I pasted into MySQL the ’ symbol it had the same problem. When I deleted it and wrote it again it it appeared successfully.

But this rewriting technique does not work with £ symbols. Why is this? the problem code is below:


<div class="style1"><p>Snooper AURA Speed Camera Subscription PLUS Speed Limit updates</p></div>
<div class="richtext3"><p>As well as providing up to the minute speed trap information you will also be able to update the speed limit data on Snooper MY-SPEED as well. To ensure that Snooper MY-SPEED is kept up to date you will have the opportunity to update the speed limit information stored on their device once a year.</p>
<p>1. Monthly £3.99 inc. vat per month</p><p>2. Quarterly £10.49 inc vat every 3 months</p><p>3. Annual £39.99 inc vat every 12 months</p><p>Minimum subscription period 12 months.</p></div>
<div class="style1"><p>What's in the box? (when purchased from ActiveGPS.co.uk)</p></div>

Hope you can help,

Matt.

2

Hello Matt,

Special characters like the pound sign, have a specific html entity assigned to them which they required to be wrote as to be shown correctly.
For example the pound’s character entity is & #163;( withouth the space ) or £. So if u replace all the pound signs with either £ or £ they should be shown correctly.

The entities always start with a ‘&’ and end with a ‘;’ with the value in between like ‘#163’ or ‘pound’.

There are quite a few lists that show quite some HTML entity’s summed up, for example:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/characterentities_famsupp_69.html

Not exactly sure why ’ worked correctly when you rewrote it, though some characters like that do just work directly.

3

It will depend upon your encoding being used and accepted on the servers and what document you copy-and-pasted from I suspect you attempted to paste a curved quote ’ or something rather than a standard ’ symbol.

The ‘replacement character’ � (often a black diamond with a white question mark) a symbol found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table.