I'm having trouble creating a pdf document which contains the '£' symbol, it always appears as '£' and I've tried various ways of escaping '£' but always end up with the 'Â' in front of the pound sterling sign.

To give an over-view of what I'm trying to do :

Data is retrieved from a MySQL data base where I have stored any '£' symbols as '£'. Retrieving is done with PHP. I then use the str_replace() function to convert '£' to '£' but if I simpy put '£' I get the  appear. I've also tried replacing with just '%A' but then '%A' appears instead !

Anyone any ideas ?