Special symbols on HTML5 canvas

Question

I want to draw special ASCII symbols on my HTML5 canvas i.e. £ but they actually show up as the letters themselves rather than a pound symbol. What can I do to make these show up correctly?

Answer 1

£ is a HTML entity, it doesn't mean anything apart in XML/SGML based markup languages.

But you don't need it as Javascript lets you manage Unicode. Simply use the literal

var pound = '£';

and be sure to save and serve your javascript files as UTF-8.

Or if you can't use UTF-8, escape it as

var pound = "\u00A3";