PHP Strange character before £ sign?

Question

For some reason i get a Â£76756687 weird character when i type a £ into a text field on my form?

Answer 1

You’re probably using UTF-8 as character encoding but don’t declare your output correctly. Because the £ character (U+00A3) is encoded in UTF-8 with 0xC2A3. And that byte sequence represents the two characters Â and £ when interpreted with ISO 8859-1.

So you just need to specify your character encoding correctly. In PHP you can use the header function to set the proper value for Content-Type header field like:

header('Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8');

But make sure that you call this function before any output. Otherwise the HTTP header is already sent and you cannot modify it.