How to use £ as unit of measurement instead of $

Configuration
1

Can anyone help I’m trying to use £ instead of $ in my configuration but has will not let me do that very new to this so if anybody can point me in the right direction that would be great

- platform: template

sensors:
cost:
friendly_name: “Today’s Cost”
unit_of_measurement: ‘£’
value_template: “{{ (states(‘sensor.today’)|float * 0.13)| round(2) }}”

It just won’t have it if I use £ but OK if I use $

2

Can’t tell because the YAML didn’t get formatted properly. What are the quote characters around £? If they’re what they look like, then that’s the problem. They must be either simple single or double quote characters, not the fancy “word processor” curly quote characters.

unit_of_measurement: '£'
3

Single quotes that are around it

4

Hmm. Well, FWIW, I just tried this:

sensor:
  - platform: template
    sensors:
      cost:
        unit_of_measurement: '£'
        value_template: "{{ 5 }}"

Works fine for me.

image

5

Configuration validation just keeps throwing me out it just doesn’t like £ for some strange reason that’s why I’m thinking it’s not a valid unit of measurement and I can’t find anything about it in the official documentation but might have my man eyes on ha ha ha

6

I’m guessing it has more to do with your text editor and what you have the encoding set to. Do you have it set to UTF-8?

7

Not sure how do you find that out

Regards

8

What editor are you using?

9

Using note pad

10

I do have note pad++ also but did not use it for this

11

I think the issue is that Notepad uses UTF-16 encoding, which is what most Windows programs use (at least by default.)

You should find an editor that uses, or can be made to use, UTF-8. E.g., I use kate, both on Windows and Linux.

Ah, just discovered. In Notepad, you can use File -> Save As…, then at the bottom you can pick UTF-8 for Encoding.

1 Like