Funny characters after server move: ???

I have had this issue twice – when migrating to 2.2, and then to 2.2.1. Both upgrades via Fantastico.

My fix is this:
– Comment out the ‘DB_CHARSET’ and ‘DB_COLLATE’ lines.
– Go to Options/Permalinks and re-save that page. (otherwise the links to posts break).

Hope this helps someone.

i did no migration nor upgrading of my wordpress ver 2.1.3 but it still have the same weird characters appearing thru out my blogposts, any solution? This only happen about a month plus ago till now.

halo, why no one reply to me??? Is this the wordpress support or not??? where is the support guys???

This issue is disgrace, sorry. But your post seemed to be the solution, Zern.

Thanks.

This is not a solution when there have been new entries after the upgrade. Making the suggested change to wp-config.php turns all the new curly quotes into garbage.

Right now it looks like I have to manually edit each entry — more agony because there is no search/replace utility in the editor, means copying and pasting into another editor and back again… ugh.

If anyone has any more information to share, I’d like to hear it.

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Thanks this worked after over a year of giving up. Zern and that person who helped people even though “been here a day and you [dare]…”

This old school bigotry excuse for ineptitude was irresponsible enough and hate crime intensive enough to make me think seriously think of suing this group of arrogant little vipers.

How Dare You screw with people’s lives and pretend you know how to develop. This A character thing was always your screw-up. No two spaces? Tell that to Ezra Pound and 100s of other poets if Code is Poetry.

This “space” needs to be investigated, if the culpable kids’ parents will testify.

Thank God for people like the First Day Helper and Zern.
Probably others who tried to help me resolve this tech puerile SCREW UP for over a year.

Shame. It is about incompetence, cowardess, hubris, and shame.

I DEMAND that a moderator of this group of threads call me and explain why litigation should not commence!

You have neither the license nor the capabilities to play with the Big Boys of any nominal age!

This does need fixing. I’ve just changed hosting services and now the blog is full of little squares. Editing them out doesn’t work so I think they might be related to the visible space character or similar but I can’t find any way to remove them.

Ive just spent several hours looking into this, not to do with wordpress, but a problem on my own site whereby restoring a mysql backup wasnt preserving the utf8 encoding

{or so it seemed}

In actual fact, the backup was restoring fine, and the data was being preserved. But my new server had a different php ini setting for the default charset.

Try this is youre having problems, who knows, it might just work. First of all try changing the charset in your browser, if youre using firefox, try forcing it to use utf8, rather than autodetect.

If this fixes the problem, you should edit your php.ini to explicitly set the default charset to be utf-8.
Hey presto, no more nasty ???

those two lines

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

were not present in my wp-config.php.
therefore, the ??? are still there.

what do i do?

Has there been any definitive fix for this? Is there a plugin that will carry out the necessary conversions?

Even though it’s only been a few minutes I’ve been able to find a plugin that worked for me. Here it is:

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-utf8-sanitize/#post-2363

It got rid of nearly all the funny characters. Just a few to manually remove deep down in the archive for me.