title: Why is this appearing in my c# strings: Â£
body: <p>I have a a string in c# initialised as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>string strVal = "£2000";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However whenever I write this string out the following is written:</p>
  
  <p>Â£2000</p>
  
  <p>It does not do this with dollars.</p>
  
  <p>An example bit of code I am using to write out the value:</p>
  
  <pre><code>System.IO.File.AppendAllText(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/logging.txt"), strVal);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm guessing it's something to do with localization but if c# strings are just unicode surely this should just work?</p>
  
  <p><strong>CLARIFICATION:</strong> Just a bit more info, Jon Skeet's answer is correct, however I also get the issue when I URLEncode the string. Is there a way of preventing this?</p>
  
  <p>So the URL encoded string looks like this:</p>
  
  <p>"%c2%a32000"</p>
  
  <p>%c2 = Â
  %a3 = £</p>
  
  <p>If I encode as ASCII the £ comes out as ?</p>
  
  <p>Any more ideas?</p>