=?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_=5Bic=5D_=A3_or_£ _for_UK_currency_symbol_in_Loca?= le

[John1]

On Thursday, July 07, 2005 4:06 PM, kevin at cursor.biz wrote:

> John1 [list_subscriber at yahoo.co.uk] wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 06, 2005 5:20 PM, kevin at cursor.biz wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>> 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?
>>
> I wouldn't use the £ sign directly myself, as I doubt that it is part
> of the standard ASCII character set.  I'd use "GBP", or wouldn't use a
> symbol at all;  A note elsewhere in the plain text email will suffice
> in most cases.
>
>>
>> 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
>>
> I'm not sure what that would be.  Perhaps some charset decoders are
> confused by the £ character and treat it as the start of a multi-byte
> special sequence.  I don't know - I'd just avoid its use.
>
>>
>> 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?
>>
> You should never use anything other than ASCII in HTML, and shouldn't
> even use the double-quote (") symbol, even though it's part of the
> ASCII charset.  All "special" characters should be encoded using
> either &#999; or preferably, and where available, entities such as
> &pound;, &quote; and especially &amp;, &gt; and &lt;.
>
Thanks Kevin - I'll follow your recommendations...