I want to send the £ symbol without utf-8 encoding

Isn't there an HTML entity for that?  Something like £

@Ray - Yeah, but my guess is that the pound symbol isn't the problem, since you don't need UTF-8 encoding to send that character (it's a normal ASCII character).

You might also want to read the man page here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

and the very well written article here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Right, Jonathan.  For some reason people often think they need to use UTF-8 when ISO-8859-1 works just fine.  I've only found UTF-8 to be necessary when I am dealing with Chinese.  For western languages, the 256 ASCII character are usually enough.  We've got Euro signs, umlauts, all kind of good stuff up there above the 127-line.

Actually, any Asian language, for that matter. :) Also, MS Office likes to use auto-formatting characters that fall outside the normal ASCII range of things, which is another pretty common scenario. Seen lots of people editing CSVs with Excel and introducing such characters into the mix.

Interesting - I have never hit that in MS Office, so I'll be on the lookout.  Thanks for the tip!

Yep. Office's replacement for the normal dash - character is a hard one to spot because they look almost identical (except Microsoft thought that an extra pixel of length was worth a character that took up another 2 bytes)

thanks