# Strange character before £ sign with text?
**URL:** https://discourse.processing.org/t/strange-character-before-sign-with-text/2106
**Category:** Processing
**Created:** [July 26, 2018, 7:23pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/strange-character-before-sign-with-text/2106 "2018-07-26T19:23:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Accrypt](https://discourse.processing.org/u/Accrypt)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2018, 7:23pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/strange-character-before-sign-with-text/2106/1 "2018-07-26T19:23:50Z")
I’ve been building a basic android app with processing and I’ve been trying to use the £ symbol a few times in my text but whenever it is displayed it has an extra character before? The symbol is an A with a small up arrow above it?
I’ve googled everything I can think of but with no luck, anyone got an idea?
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### Author:  [@neilcsmith](https://discourse.processing.org/u/neilcsmith)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2018, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.processing.org/t/strange-character-before-sign-with-text/2106/2 "2018-07-26T19:57:19Z")
It’s a character encoding issue. You need to specify UTF-8 somewhere. Depends where the text is - file or source code? I’ve seen this with websites - see eg. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2066693/php-strange-character-before-£-sign](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2066693/php-strange-character-before-%C2%A3-sign)