PHP substr从xml feed中提供奇怪的字符

For some reason when using substr I am getting a weird character on output like this "".

All I am doing is this:

$price = substr($game->price, 1);
$dollars_original = substr($game->fullPrice, 1);
echo "Price: $" . $price . "<br />
";
echo "Original Price: $" . $dollars_original . "<br />
";

This comes from an XML feed here: http://itch.io/browse/platform-linux/price-sale.xml which i parse like so:

$url = 'http://itch.io/browse/platform-linux/price-sale.xml';
$xml = simplexml_load_string(file_get_contents($url));

So for example a price might be £0.89 but, when removing the £ sign it comes out as �0.89

What am I missing here?

It looks like you have a mixup in character encodings. What is Latin-1 or Windows-1252, and what is UTF-8? If you're working on UTF-8 data, you may have to use mb_substr(), which is UTF-8 aware.