£ signs change to ? in text fields

Report · Aug 05, 2009

When I update data held in text type fields in an SQL 2005 table from textareas in dreamweaver '£' signs get converted to '?'.

This is part of a system allowing users to enter paragraphs of text to build up into letters fro printing direct from the browser.

e.g. "A surcharge of £350 is to be applied." will be changed to "A surcharge of ?350 is to be applied."

Both the PC I am using and the SQL server have their regional settings set to United Kingdom.

I added culture="en-GB" to the page line as follows:

<%@ Page Language="VB" ContentType="text/html" ResponseEncoding="iso-8859-1" culture="en-GB" %>

This has had the effect of changing the default currency format to use £s but this does not solve the problem with £ signs inside a text field.

Report · Aug 06, 2009

I don't know much about ASP, but the £ signs being displayed as ? is an encoding issue. Your encoding is iso-8859-1, which doesn't support the £ sign. You probably need to switch to utf-8 and make sure that the insert forms and database also use the same encoding.