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

[Kevin Walsh]

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;.

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