domxml

Hi, I have a web page with a form. I want the user to be able to use the £ symbol in a text field on the form. I then pass the value of the text field(the £ symbol) to a DOMXML function which creates a XML string which is transformed into XHTML using the XSLT functions. I have a meta tag defining the encoding of the web page as UTF-8. (So the £ symbol is being passed into the DOMXML function in this format? I echo it out just before doing this and it displays correctly.) the DOMXML functions use UTF-8 for input and output. When I echo the XML output before passing it to the XSLT functions, I see that it has placed a  symbol immediately before the £ symbol. Why? What is going on? Any ideas very much appreciated. Douglas.