title: HTML - £ pound symbol from database displayed as ? even with charset=UTF-8
body: <p>We have a bunch of database data that someone manually entered. They contain a lot of British Pound (£) symbols. The original user copy/pasted the pound sign from somewhere, not sure where (I'm not sure if it matters or not...).</p>
  
  <p>Anyways, when printing out the data on a PHP page, the pound signs appear as the <a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/FFFD/index.htm" rel="noreferrer">replacement character</a>. The page has <code>&lt;meta charset="utf-8"/&gt;</code> in it. In the browser, if you change the encoding to <code>ISO-8859-1</code>, then the pound signs show up correctly.</p>
  
  <p>After some digging, I've come to the conclusion that the original data entry person copy/pasted an <code>ISO-8859-1</code> encoded pound sign into the database. So unless the page is rendered using <code>ISO-8859-1</code>, it won't show up correctly.</p>
  
  <p>Here is the header information from Chrome:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Request URL:http://www.mysite.com/test.php
  Request Method:GET
  Status Code:200 OK
  Request Headersview source
  Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
  Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
  Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
  Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
  Cache-Control:max-age=0
  Connection:keep-alive
  Cookie:X-Mapping-goahf....
  Host:www.mysite.com
  User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2
  Response Headersview source
  Connection:Keep-Alive
  Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
  Date:Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:38:14 GMT
  Server:Apache/2.2
  Transfer-Encoding:chunked
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Also the MySQL table says it uses <code>latin1_swedish_ci</code> which was the default.</p>
  
  <p>So how do I go about fixing this problem? I don't know a lot about how character encoding works and what happens when you copy/paste characters from one place to another.</p>
  
  <p>I tried going to this page:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a3/browsertest.htm" rel="noreferrer">http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a3/browsertest.htm</a></p>
  
  <p>And copying the pound symbol and pasting it into the database, thinking that would fix it, but it didn't appear to... How do I make the pound symbol that is in the database a UTF-8 pound symbol instead of ISO-8859-1 ?</p>