When I moved hosting provider last year, I no longer had the £ (english pound) sign available. I solved the problem by converting HTML-entities to UTF-8 characters in the database and changing to the English UTF-8 language pack.
This weekend I have built a forum using SMF 2.0 and on the test server everything is fine using the standard English language pack with a UTF-8 database. I have ported the site to my live server and once again, no £ sign. As there is no UTF-8 language pack for SMF 2.0, can anyone please suggest why it works on the old server and not the new one? Failing that, will there be an SMF 2.0 UTF-8 language pack?
Remember: SMF 2.1 is in beta stage...
I'm not sure of the back end process of converting the actual db to UTF8 for 2.* but have you performed this action on your SMF 2.* install?
This turned out to be an interesting problem. It appears my SMF2 database is supporting UTF8 just fine. I built my SMF2 site on a test server, which uses PHP4. I then ported it to my live site on a server with PHP5. During the data import, any post with a £ sign in it was truncated at that point. The same thing happened with some other extended characters too, such as smart quotes that has been pasted in from word processors.
Once I repaired the data with a few update queries all is well and you can create new posts that require 2 byte characters without any problems.