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I thought utf-8 would be able to handle just a neat £ instead of having to convert to entities?
What's the proper way of handling the GBP symbol with UTF-8 and HTML5?
(ps. don't think the html5 part should make any difference)
update:
Here's test document:
<!doctype html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>GBP Test</title>
</head>
<body>
£55
<br />
£55
</body>
Thanks everyone for your help.
For anyone else facing this frustration the issue comes with your text editor. Even Notepad formats in non utf-8.
SOLUTION:
Changed Read and Write formats to UTF-8 in my text editor (PHP Designer)
296
The HTML5 specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set.
The HTML5 Standard: Unicode UTF-8 Unicode enables processing, storage, and transport of text independent of platform and language. The default character encoding in HTML-5 is UTF-8.
The default character encoding for HTML5 is UTF-8.
Just use the character. It will work fine.
The symbol has a different code point in UTF-8 than in ISO-8859-1 of course. A ISO-8859-1 encoded pound sign will not work in UTF-8, and vice versa. You'd have to convert it.
Related: When Should One Use HTML Entities
181
The short answer is that you don't need to use entities for most characters as long as you declare the documents character set to UTF-8 (using either a Content-Type header, a meta charset element in the head, or an xml encoding attribute with XHTML)...
The only characters you NEED to encode in a UTF-8 HTML document are (Depending on the context):
& => &< => <> => >" => "And if you are using XHTML (which is also valid XML), you also need to encode single quotes with either (again, depending on the context):
' => '' => '' => '(Note that the last 2 are preferred, since ' is not defined in HTML...)
Also note that &, < and > need to be escaped everywhere, and " and ' only need to be escaped inside of the appropriate attribute (so if an attribute is quoted using ", you'd need to escape all other " characters inside of that attribute)...
See the HTML 5 Draft for more information...
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