Currency Symbols to Numerical Encoding

I m having many currency symbols. i want to convert them to numerical unicode like £ to £ as I need to extract this n开发者_如何学运维umber 163 and use it.

Thanks in Advance.

Some people already implemented "uniord" ;)

function uniord($c) {
    $h = ord($c{0});
    if ($h <= 0x7F) {
        return $h;
    } else if ($h < 0xC2) {
        return false;
    } else if ($h <= 0xDF) {
        return ($h & 0x1F) << 6 | (ord($c{1}) & 0x3F);
    } else if ($h <= 0xEF) {
        return ($h & 0x0F) << 12 | (ord($c{1}) & 0x3F) << 6
                                 | (ord($c{2}) & 0x3F);
    } else if ($h <= 0xF4) {
        return ($h & 0x0F) << 18 | (ord($c{1}) & 0x3F) << 12
                                 | (ord($c{2}) & 0x3F) << 6
                                 | (ord($c{3}) & 0x3F);
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

What's wrong with simply using ord function?

$symbol = "£";
$code = ord($symbol);  //should return 163

URL Encode gives you everything in hexidecimal format, but when converted to an int, it gives you the UTF-8 char code without the need for workarounds.

<?php echo hexdec(substr(urlencode('£'), -2, 2)); ?>

EDIT
Perhaps mb_string could help with your encoding issues.

In case you only want to replace some characters in a string, use the replac function: http://php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php

EDIT: For this you need to know the codes beforehand, but you can find most here: http://w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

And dollar, that isn't in that list, is &# 36;