English Pound signs not displaying and causing problem in admin

Hi Guys, I just upgraded from 1.3.9b to 1.5.0.
My site shows just as I expect it to except my English pounds signs £ were displaying in some cases as a small black triangle with a question mark in the black triangle.
so I've been going through the attributes (option names text boxes) and changing them to the full html version &pound instead of the keyboard typed £ and this seems to work.

Now my related problem is that on some of my products' descriptions I have an English pound symbol written by me within the main description of the text
but when I go into Admin/Catalog/Categories/Products then into a category then a product
I can see and edit the Products Description on most of my products, but on some I see just a white box with none of my text showing and if I press Preview I don't see the text on preview.
The webpage showing the actual product does show the text that should be there. It's just that now I can't edit it.

I've noticed that the faulty ones are where I wrote an English Pound sign in the body of the text so now I can't edit the product to fix the problem.
I've attached a small screenshot to show the incorect symbol that I see in my product.

Is there something that I can do to fix this?
I tried to use the Admin/Developers Toolkit to search for some of the keywords so that I could locate which products were not displaying the text within Admin but when I searched I couldn't locate any of my keywords, so I guess that this function isn't designed to search through my products.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

Nedward

From the v1.5.0 release notes:

A Word About UTF-8 vs iso-8859-1
Please see this online article for guidance on upgrading old sites from iso-8859-1 to utf8

Thanks DrByte, I will read that.
To be honest I saw that in the release notes and I had no idea what it was or what it meant or what relevance it had to me.
I'll do better next time.
Thanks for your quick response.
Kindest Regards

Nedward:oops:

Hi DrByte

all sorted - Many thanks.:clap:

I've made the changes to my includes/languages/english.php file from utf-8 to latin1 and my webpages started showing the English Pound sign correctly, but my admin was still showing blanks in the descriptions.
So I then also changed the other english.php which is located in Admin/languages/english.php and now this is working as it should.

the link you sent me to gave this advice:

To do this, you'll need to edit your upgraded english.php file to use the old CHARSET and setlocale settings, as well as edit your configure.php file to set DB_CHARSET to 'latin1' instead of 'utf8'.But my configure.php's don't mention the charset, so I didn't make any changes in there, just the english.php files.

Once again, Thanks for the advice

Changing the configure.php from utf8 to latin1 in both includes/ and YOURADMIN/includes in my upgraded cart solved it for me.

Thanks for clarifying this, Nedward - this worked for me
Miles

or if you wanted to leave your configure files using the utf-8 charset

you can change £ for ```
£

or for € ```
€

etc.,