encoding - displaying EURO symbol and more - UTF-8 charset

this is driving me bonkers. I have a column in my table with all currency symbols and am trying to display them but to no avail.

my page is set as utf8

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

I have tried mb_convert_encoding, utf8_encode but cant seem to s=get it to display correctly.

At the moment I have

function isUTF8($str) {
    if ($str === mb_convert_encoding(mb_convert_encoding($str, "UTF-32", "UTF-8"), "UTF-8", "UTF-32")) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}
echo ( isUTF8( $ar['currrency_symbol'] ) ? $ar['currrency_symbol'] : mb_convert_encoding( $ar['currrency_symbol'], 'UTF-8' ) );

which also doesn't work.

any help is much appreciated.

EDIT

function get_currency_symbol( $code ) {
$con = Database::getInstance();
    $re = $con->query("SELECT * FROM `countryinfo` WHERE currency_code = '$code'");
    if( $re->num_rows == 0 ) {
        return '£';   
    }
    $ar = $re->fetch开发者_如何转开发_assoc();
    echo ( isUTF8( $ar['currrency_symbol'] ) ? $ar['currrency_symbol'] : mb_convert_encoding( $ar['currrency_symbol'], 'UTF-8' ) );
    //return iconv( mb_detect_encoding( $ar['currrency_symbol'] ), 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT', $ar['currrency_symbol'] );
}

///

abstract class Database {
    private static $instance = NULL;
    private function __clone() {}
    public function __construct() {}
    public static function getInstance() {
        if ( NULL === self::$instance ) {
            self::$instance = new MySQLi( DBSERVER, DBUSER, DBPASS, DBNAME );
        }
        self::$instance->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
        return self::$instance;
    }
    public function kill_con() {
        self::$instance->close();   
    }
}

It could help to convert your document to UTF-8 (without BOM) using for example Notepad++.

In case you are using a database to fetch the data, execute the following query before all other queries:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");

Do you use PDO for your database connection? If yes, try using:

PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8'

As a an option when creating the connection.

See: http://www.php.net/manual/de/pdo.construct.php -> $driver_options