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

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.