PHP：货币数据显示不正确

I am trying to display ebay deals rss into my wordpress site, I am using wordpress built functions to achieve this:

  $desc = $item->get_description();  // to get the feed item description
  setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'en_US');
  echo utf8_encode(money_format('%n', $desc));

In when I get $235.99 it is being displayed as .99 or 5.99 used escape characters but with not use.... not sure what is wrong in this.