can anyone help

[shopper]

hi all,

when trying to use the pound sign on the keyboard in notepad, the only result is (going live with the page) a small box shape appears instead of the pound sign. :confused:

Can anyone explain this to me.

Thanks in advance.

[chartfieldconsultants]

Hmmm. A few thoughts occur to me, mostly around character sets / encoding.

Do you see the pound correctly in Notepad but broken in your browser (and, if so, which browser do you use)? Or is the pound broken in Notepad too? And do you ever experience this while using other programs or carrying out different tasks in the same programs?

One possible cause, which is a lot rarer these days than it used to be, is that your computer is speaking American while you're speaking English. If your machine's default language setting is US English then shift-3 won't give you a pound sign, it'll give you a hash sign - which in some fonts looks very much like a little box. But it would do that in every program, not just Notepad. Worth a check, though, especially if you have just bought the machine (on eBay, from a vendor in Tallahassee).

Likelier is that you were pasting in some kind of fancy pound sign that wasn't available to the programs it failed to display in. Try using £ instead and see if that works.

[authcode]

Special characters should always be replaced with an entity code in html pages, that's the only way to be sure they'll display correctly across all browsers and platforms. As chartfieldconsultants says above, using £ will solve your problem.
Google "html entities" for more info.

[shopper]

Hi,

Thanks guys, the code worked a treat.
Many many thanks. :D

[chartfieldconsultants]

No worries :)

For reference, for the future, you can find most of the ones you'll ever need here at Webmonkey (http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/reference/special_characters/) and all of 'em here at the WDG (http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/).