[ic] £ or £ for UK currency symbol in Locale

[ic at 3edge.com]

John1 writes: 

> On Wednesday, July 06, 2005 5:20 PM, kevin at cursor.biz wrote: 
> 
>> John1 [list_subscriber at yahoo.co.uk] wrote:
>>> I am a little cautious about doing this as it would also impact the
>>> plain text e-mail templates which use the [currency] tag.  i.e. They
>>> would display £ instead of a pound sign, so I would have to
>>> change any e-mail templates to hard code a pound sign. 
>>> 
>> For UK websites, I tend to set the currency_symbol to £ and
>> then use a simple filter in the emails to convert £ to GBP: 
>> 
>>    [item-filter price2gbp][item-price][/item-filter] 
>> 
>> The filter looks like this: 
>> 
>>    CodeDef price2gbp Filter
>>    CodeDef price2gbp Routine <<EOR
>>    sub {
>>        my $val = shift; 
>> 
>>        $val =~ s/&price;\s*/GBP /g;
>>        return $val;
>>    }
>>    EOR 
>> 
>> Prices on pages look like "&pound;123.45" and prices in emails look
>> like "GBP 123.45".  You could modify the filter to strip the currency
>> altogether and add a note in the email along the lines of "all price
>> values are British Pounds Sterling."  The filter could even look up
>> the currency_symbol for itself and strip it automagically. 
>> 
>> Perhaps Interchange could be modified to define a currency_plaintext
>> Locale key and use that, instead of currency_symbol, when a certain
>> pragma is set on a page/email.  Something to think about/discuss. 
>> 
> Thanks for your detailed and very helpful reply Kevin.  I presume that it 
> would be fine for me to use: 
> 
> $val =~ s/&price;\s*/£/g; 
> 
> in the plain text filter as the £ symbol is part of the standard ASCII 
> character set and so should display correctly in any plain text e-mail 
> reader.  Correct? 
> 
> BTW, we have occasionally had customers complain that the first digit has 
> also been truncated from prices (and I think, from memory, in this case # 
> signs were displayed in place of £ signs).  e.g. £123.50 might display 
> as #23.50 
> 
> Is this also likely to be due to the fact we are using £ instead of 
> &pound; in our html, or will there be a different client-side reason for 
> this?

If you have a site visited by an international audience, I think you're 
probably better off using the raw character code 163  (so &#163;) .. This is 
due to the fact that 'pound sign' for the US means the 'hash #' sign ... 

The rest of the (more technical) question I gladly leave to Kevin ;) 

CU, 

Gert