Encoding problem (UTF-8) in PHP

Question

I want to output the following string in PHP:

ä ö ü ß €

Therefore, I've encoded it to utf8 manually:

ä ö ü ß €

So my script is:

<?php
header('content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
echo 'ä ö ü ß €';
?>

The first 4 characters are correct (ä ö ü ß) but unfortunately the € sign isn't correct:

ä ö ü ß

Here you can see it.

Can you tell me what I've done wrong? My editor (Notepad++) has settings for Encoding (Ansi/UTF-8) and Format (Windows/Unix). Do I have to change them?

I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

That last character just isn't in the file (try viewing the source), which is why you don't see it.

I think you might be better off saving the PHP file as UTF-8 (in Notepad++ that options is available in Format -> Encode in UTF-8 without BOM), and inserting the actual characters in your PHP file (i.e. in Notepad++), rather than hacking around with inserting Ã everywhere. You may find Windows Character Map useful for inserting unicode characters.

Answer 2

The Euro sign (U+20AC) is encoded in UTF-8 with three bytes, not two. This can be seen here. So your encoding is simply wrong.