Character encoding

We haven’t seen any character encoding issues to date, so this may require some further investigation.

What hosting provider do you use? Can you check or ask them to verify the character set they’re using for your MySQL database as a starting point?

Thanks.

Thanks for your reply. It says utf8mb4 Unicode. Does that help?

Sorry, it’s ?￠?? (not what I said above).

I believe the character set is likely the root cause. We’ve never tested this with utf8mb4, only regular utf8. I’ve opened an issue to review this, but we can’t guarantee when or if this can be resolved:

https://github.com/alleyinteractive/apple-news/issues/146

Can you confirm what language you’re publishing in?

Yes, it’s English (UK). There are no odd/extended/foreign characters.

FYI, WordPress implemented utf8mb4 from version 4.2 last year:

The utf8mb4 Upgrade

In theory, almost all users running 4.2 or later will have database tables using utf8mb4 it seems.

Right, no one is saying that’s the problem. We just need to rule out all options. We’ll let you know when we have any further info.

I will say, I noticed our author had presumably pasted the content into WordPress from Word or some other such editor, which had replaced all the regular apostrophes and double quotes with directional quotes.

I deleted the old draft from Apple News, edited the post to replace the directional single/double quotes with regular ones in the WordPress editor, resaved and republished to Apple News.

No joy – I was certain that was going to be it.

The quotes you’re mentioning are standard within WordPress and wouldn’t cause an issue. We should be able to look into this further in the next couple of weeks.

Hi,

Did you get a chance to look at this?

This is being looked into in the next couple of weeks.

Hi @itsnotrocketsurgery—

Can you please try again with the latest version of the plugin, released this week (1.2.3)? We included a fix that should address this issue.

Thanks!

I’m going to close this issue for now. If you experience problems with the latest version of the plugin, please let us know.