RE: [ic] £ or £ for UK currency symbol in Loca le

[Michael Curtis]

-----Original Message-----
From: interchange-users-bounces at icdevgroup.org [mailto:interchange-users-bounces at icdevgroup.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Walsh
Sent: 07 July 2005 16:07
To: interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
Subject: RE: [ic] £ or £ for UK currency symbol in Loca le

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;.

--
   _/   _/  _/_/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/  _/    _/
  _/_/_/   _/_/      _/    _/    _/    _/_/  _/   K e v i n   W a l s h
 _/ _/    _/          _/ _/     _/    _/  _/_/    kevin at cursor.biz
_/   _/  _/_/_/_/      _/    _/_/_/  _/    _/

_______________________________________________


Dabbling with IC5.3

I too have tried to edit the variable.txt directly to display the £ symbol and like other this displayed as a '?'

The solution for me was to edit variable.txt through the admin interface to use the £ symbol and it now displays correctly

But, the discussion below begs the question, should symbols be used in pricing at all?

Should we be using GBP or USD etc?


Regards


Mike Curtis


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