How to print out the square root symbol when running a PHP script in a Windows 10 command prompt?

Question

For a PHP (5.6) script that is run in the command line I am attempting to print the square root symbol but am failing to do so. Instead I get junk characters.

I have already read the many questions/answers on printing unicode characters from PHP CLI to the command line but none relate exactly to my example.

I am on Windows 10 using the standard command prompt (cmd.exe) which I am happy using.

I am using the Consolas font and have run chcp 65001 to set the prompt to utf-8. *Have also tried Lucida console*.

// Square root symbol

echo "\u221A";
echo "\xe2\x88\x9a";
echo '√';

I have tried iconv(), json_decode(), mb_convert_encoding() and pack() all unsuccessfully.

Answer 1

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<?php
    shell_exec('chcp 65001'); // set to utf-8
    $formatter = "\033[0m%s\n"; // use white text
    $sqrt      = html_entity_decode('&radic;');
    $output    = sprintf($formatter, $sqrt);
    $output   .= sprintf($formatter, $sqrt);
    // Padding required on the last line to prevent miscellaneous chars printing to the console
    // (Double the total number of lines (3))
    $output   .= sprintf($formatter, $sqrt . str_repeat(' ', 3*2));
    echo rtrim($output, "\n");