Pound sign (£) in HTML
The pound sign is the currency symbol for sterling. Its named reference is £ and its code point is U+00A3, and it is not the same thing as the hash or number sign.
At a glance
- Character
- £
- Named entity
- £
- Decimal reference
- £
- Hex reference
- £
- Unicode code point
- U+00A3
- Unicode name
- POUND SIGN
- In the entity reference
- Currency, and pinned in quick access
In detail
The name causes trouble across the Atlantic. In British usage the pound sign is this currency symbol; in older American telephone and typewriter usage the pound sign is the hash character at U+0023, the one now universally called hash or the number sign. A support article that tells a user to press the pound key means two different keys depending on where they are reading.
As a currency symbol it goes before the amount with no space, and it stays with the amount when a line wraps, which is one of the standard cases for a non-breaking space in a template that separates the two. Pence under a pound are conventionally written with the p suffix rather than the symbol and a decimal, so 60p rather than a fraction of a pound.
The character is in the Latin-1 range, so it survived the single byte era intact and its named entity is one of the oldest in HTML. That same history creates the most recognisable encoding bug on British sites: UTF-8 bytes read as Latin-1 turn the pound sign into a capital A with a circumflex followed by the pound sign, because the two byte sequence is being read as two separate characters.
There is a separate symbol, the lira sign at U+20A4, that looks like a pound sign with two crossbars. It is not sterling and it is not a stylistic variant, so a font that draws the pound sign with two bars is making a design choice while the lira sign is a different character with a different meaning.
Examples
<p>Total: £ 24.99</p>
<p>Delivery from £3.50, or 60p per item.</p>Correct: \u00A3 rendered from bytes C2 A3 as UTF-8
Broken: the same two bytes read as Latin-1 render as two characters
Fix: serve Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8Things that catch people out
- Telling a caller to press the pound key is ambiguous. Say the hash key, or name the symbol.
- A currency column that mixes the symbol with plain numbers cannot be summed. Store the numeric value and the currency code, and render the symbol at display time.
- The lira sign and the pound sign are different code points that look alike in some fonts, so a copied price can carry the wrong currency entirely.
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All html entities →Euro sign (€) in HTML
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The degree sign at U+00B0, its entity forms, the spacing rule that differs between temperatures and angles, and the three characters it gets confused with.
Plus minus sign (±) in HTML
The plus minus sign at U+00B1, its entity forms, how it reads in a tolerance versus a measurement uncertainty, and the minus plus character that reverses it.
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