Why can't I display a pound (£) symbol in HTML?

Question

I\'m trying to display the pound symbol in HTML (from PHP) but all I get is a symbol with a question mark.

The following are things that I\'ve tried.

In PHP:

Answer 1

This works in all chrome, IE, Firefox.

In Database > table > field type .for example set the symbol column TO varchar(2) utf8_bin php code:

$symbol = '£';
echo mb_convert_encoding($symbol, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');
or 
html_entity_decode($symbol, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');

And also make sure set the HTML OR XML encoding to encoding="UTF-8"

Note: You should make sure that database, document type and php code all have a same encoding

How ever the better solution would be using £