ascii characters, html entities, and plain text emails

[neophyte]

Hello All

This isn't strictly a php question (so moderator, feel free to re-locate this post if necessary) but I've got a php script that dumps a bunch of text from a form which includes £, ¥ or &euro to the screen. This works fine - the different currency symbols are accurately reflected.

However, at the end of this procedure, a plain text email is sent with the same text and currency symbols.

The text comes out fine, but the currency symbols are reflected by their HTML entity characters (£, ¥, €).

I've tried the ASCII equivalents for these characters (i.e. € for the euro sign) but still no luck - the currency symbols are continue to maintain the ASCII code rather than the appropriate currency symbol.

So, when reflecting special symbols in plain text format, how do you do it?

All guidance greatly appreciated,

Neophyte

[edited by: eelixduppy at 9:28 am (utc) on May 5, 2009]
[edit reason] disabled smileys [/edit]

[eeek]

You probably need to set the character set in the MIME headers to UTF-8.