Question

I am using the following code as an example

$locale = 'cy_GB';
setlocale ( LC_MONETARY  , $locale );
$conv = localeconv();           
$currencyRateSymbol = $conv['int_curr_symbol'];
var_dump($currencyRateSymbol);

The problem is that I am getting string '�' (length=1) when I am looking for £

This is happening for every locale that I use including baht, pound and euro.
what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

length=1 means it’s one byte long. “�” means you’re trying to display it as Unicode and the Unicode decoder could not decode this byte correctly. The £ symbol encoded in UTF-8 is two bytes.

Ergo…

The £ symbol is not encoded in UTF-8, but you are trying to decode it as UTF-8, hence it fails.

Use the UTF-8 version of your locale if it exists on your system (e.g. cy_GB.UTF-8) or specify the correct encoding to the client that’s trying to display this (probably ISO-8859-1).