PHP + Oracle and UK locale

(Redirected by "Harry Sufehmi" <milis-2@harrysufehmi.com>) First sorry if this email was already received by you, I sent this originally on the weekend but didn't seem to be showing up in the list, so trying to repost again today. I've setup phpBB in my company using Oracle as its backend. Everyone's happy with it, but there's one small annoyance - the pound sign (british currency symbol) kept on getting stored as hash sign (#). Anyone encountered this problem before? I've tried a lot of things - searching on web and newsgroups (not easy when everyone else referred to pound sign and it turned out to be the hash sign..!), installed the latest version of PHP, setting up the proper environment variable (especially NLS_LANG="ENGLISH.UNITED KINGDOM.UTF8") in .profile & httpd.conf & using putenv() in the script itself, and so on - still no joy. The database itself uses UTF8 charset and AMERICA.AMERICAN locale. If I use sqlplus, it's correctly entered as the pound sign. But using a PHP test script, it was still fine just before it's submitted to Oracle, INSERT it, then it's suddenly turned into hash. Please feel free to enlighten me on this matter. Thanks! Harry