£ in a variable

[coops2000]

HI,
I'm doing a simple function retrieve data and export the data into xml, but found out xml does not like all character. The character I have found are '&','','<','>','£'. So I have developed a simple function that will replace curtain character within a string with the HTML code that XML likes. '&#38;','&#172;','&#60;','&#62;','&#163;'
It seems to work with all character, but apart from "£" sign. The only reason is because if i use the below code

 while($i < strlen($value)){     
      $ia=0;
        $sign = $value{$i};
           
      while($ia < count($strarValidation)){
       
         if($strarValidation[$ia] == $sign){                 
         
          $sign = $strarNewChar[$ia];
          break;
        }
        $ia++;
      }
     
      $endValue.= $sign; 

The value at

 $sign = $value{$i}; 

for a £ is the HTML code, not "£". So the function can't be used...

Does anyone else know of a way that I can stop the "£" converting to the html code when converting the string variable into a array?

Thanks

[Twey]

You're using the wrong character encoding. Switch to UTF-8. Also, PHP by default doesn't like multi-byte encodings very much; make sure you're using the mbstring with function overloading turned on.