? symbol is appearing everywhere!

  • Hi!

    I’m having so many issues! Odd symbols are appearing. This is the latest: ?

    How do I get rid of this? My charset is UTF-8

    Thank you!!
    Sheen

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)

  • What happens with the default theme (Twenty Eleven)?

    Thread Starter sheenp

    (@sheenp)

    Hi Knut!

    Same issue.

    I did see some at first but now I can’t find any. Please post a url to a page which has a problem.

    When I hit this issue it is usually a mismatch between the charset my website announced in it’s headers and the charset it actually output.

    There is an easy test – I only use Firefox so please bear with me – go to View tab and select character encoding. Try the different charset options given (it won’t do any damage!).

    If you can find a charset with which the page displays correctly then that is the charset you are actually using on the web page.

    So now it is just a matter of changing one or the other into agreement.
    Probably is easiest just to change the header section. If the params in your header section are different or missing, then just set charset to the charset FF says that you are actually transmitting!

    Steve

    Thread Starter sheenp

    (@sheenp)

    Hi!

    The symbols went away when I changed the charset back to -4, but then another symbol appeared. Should I just leave it at -4 and delete the symbol throughout the site?

    Thank you again!!
    Sheen

    Hi Sheen,

    I don’t know – my browser actually gives me names for character sets like UTF-8, Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 ……..

    Give me your URL expressed in text so the filters don’t mangle it, and I’ll have a look at the page for you.

    Skip the httxx.. stuff … I just need domain, directory, and page such as

    Domain is “My Domain name without TLD”
    My TLD is “com or org or net or whatever”
    My Directory is “root” or “directory path”
    Page name is “basename, i.e. without extension”
    Extension is “php or html or whatever”

    Capiche?

    Steve

    PS if you don”t want to publicly refer to the URL here, mail my user name at gmail dot com
    Steve

    https://www.essentialalchemist.com is the site correct?

    The symbols went away when I changed the charset back to -4

    Where is this -4 thing?

    Where is this -4 thing?

    utf-4 no you can’t leave it at that.

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US" xmlns:og="https://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/">
<head>
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="3234A16C79765EEE37D0A7874DE3FA3B" />
<meta charset="UTF-4" />

    The problem lies right there in the meta charset which is set to UTF-4 when it should be UTF-8

    I’ve browsed your page with FF and it IS definitely UTF-8.
    It displays just fine for me – probably because I’ve set up my browser to scan for the ACTUAL charset (i.e. to ignore the announced one).

    Your problem is that your header section is announcing “utf-4”.
    (which I have never even heard of …)

    So – you need to get that line to read

    <meta charset=”UTF-8″ />`

    Over …………….

    Steve

    Once you get it changed back to UTF-8 if the problem is still there start the normal wordpress debug.

    – deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.
    – switching to the Twenty Eleven theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

    @kmessenger

    Isn’t wp-config the place to change the character set?
    If so, could you remind us of the command syntax, plz.

    Secondly, the existing mysql data base probably needs a clean-up, so she will need
    1) the SQL command to export all posts and comments,
    2) some text editor advice on how to batch convert utf-4 or UTF-4 to utf-8 (or UTF-8) , i.e. a case insensitive solution
    3) the SQL commands to import the updated posts and comments file to replace the originals.

    Steve

    sheenp started with utf-8 so I would think the database was created with that. If not, this plugin can change it, https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/utf-8-db-converter/

    In wp-config.php there is this to create the character set in the db

    /** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

    On browsing through her site – it seems that the odd character still misbehaving is coded in Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 , so your db converter should fix any remaining problems nicely.

    Only concern is what the side-effects (if any) might be on the existing utf-8 coded records. Would it be safer to do a two stage conversion via ISO-8859-1 ?

    Thread Starter sheenp

    (@sheenp)

    Hello wonderful people!

    Thank you so much for all of the time you’ve put forth in helping me. When I switched from utf-8 to utf-4 it got rid of one of the codes but now I keep finding this “?”. I’m not sure what to do. As you may have guessed, I’m not a “coder”. ??

    Thank you again!!
    Sheen

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)
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