But the pound is not 156 in every coding :)
e.g. the utf8 codepoint for the pound is U00A3, which is 163 in dec, not 156.
See
pound sign
It is
163 (0x00a3) in 8859-1, 8859-13, 8859-14, 8859-15, 8859-3, 8859-7, 8859-8, 8859-9, CP1252, CP1253, CP1254, CP1255, CP1256, CP1257, CP1258, CP864, ROMAN, SAMI_WIN, SAMI_MAC, and CENTEURO
It is
156 (0x009c) in CP437, CP775, CP850. CP857, CP860, CP861, CP862, CP863, CP865, CP869, CP1116, and VENTURA_INT
It is
177 (0x00b1) in CP1122
Maybe it is better to use UTF8 after all
# perl -C2 -le'use charnames qw(:full); print "\N{POUND SIGN}"'
£