PHP / Codeigniter中的UTF-8特殊字符无法正确显示

Question

I am working on a friends website, he complained that he could not enter £ on his product pages, instead they were appearing as black square with ? in them (�)

I have been digging around in the code for 2 days now and am unable to find the culprit.

I have a MySQL DB with all the data in it. The DB and table/field are all set to: utf8_general_ci

Looking at a record in PHPMyAdmin, the record shoes £ as expected.

However, when looking at the front end, the £ displays as a black square with a question mark in side of it.

I read in multiple places that is due to the browser not knowing it is UTF-8 character so I checked and all pages contain the following in the tags:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

The only way I can get it to display correctly is if I change the encoding via the browser to ISO-8859-1 or ammend the above meta tag to reflect the ISO-8859-1:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

Is anybody able to help me with what to try next?

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

Use this to the variable while output

$var = "£";
echo utf8_encode($var);

and make sure your

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

is in the header