Arbitrary ASCII characters showing up in old posts

  • I have several blogs that are displaying characters like “?” in the middle of posts. Here’s an example:

    https://www.howtomakemoneyblogging.net/articles/how-to-pick-a-domain-name/

    the characters didn’t used to be in the posts. My best guess is that wordpress changed character encoding during some recent upgrade, and that the person who wrote the posts (not me, I just maintain them), copied words and phrases from the web, including style information. The previous encoding made the extra characters invisible, while this encoding displays them.

    I don’t know, it’s just a theory.

    In any case, is there is a quick fix here? If not, I’m looking at editing thousands of posts.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter pmichaud

    (@pmichaud)

    What’s the right procedure for bumping topics? If I don’t get a response in the couple minutes that I’m still on page 1, then I’m out of luck? or is there a different place I can ask without spamming this forum?

    I completely understand that there are more questions here than people who can answer them, but it IS frustrating to never get a response when I need help 8/

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    IIRC, WP 2.9 changed the db to UTF-8. Or at least I remember having a similar error when I changed my DB from Latin1 to UTF-8.

    I’d do a search/replace of SQL to change ? to whatever it’s supposed to be.

    update yourWP_database set wp_posts = replace(wp_posts, '?', 'whatever');

    (Policy/Procedure is to NOT bump, as many volunteers here look at topics with no replies and assume they need help. Bumps look like replies)

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    You know, I’m an idiot.

    update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, '?', 'whatever');

    The other one would have just failed.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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