Greek characters display as “?”

Scroll down to where you see “? (lambda)” and “? = failures” to see the issue.

@macadk see: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/insert-special-characters/#how%20come%20i%20do%20not%20see%20all%20the%20special%20characters%3F

When a character is displayed using a font that doesn’t support that character, a default “not defined” glyph from that font is used. The “not defined” glyph in most fonts has the appearance of a rectangular box, or some variation of that.

One example of a font with support for wide range of glyphs is the Noto family by Google Fonts, which can be loaded by the theme to render the missing characters.

Noto: https://fonts.google.com/noto

Hi jeffpaul,

That would have been a nice, easy solution, but unfortunately, it did not work. I’m using the WP Google Fonts plugin, https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-google-fonts/, to manage the use of Google fonts on my site. I selected the Noto Sans font and enabled the Greek variant.

I returned to my post, re-inserted the lambda character where I needed it, and then updated the post and checked the displayed version. You can easily find this part of the post by searching for the word “lambda” in the text.

I commented out these lines in my wp-config, and now I can get the site to display Greek characters correctly, but I’m concerned that I may create a problem in my site’s DB if I leave it this way.

// define( ‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’ );
// define( ‘DB_COLLATE’, ‘utf8_general_ci’ );

I’m wondering if I need to upgrade my DB to utf8mb4 and if that will solve the problem with the character display. Any input on this question is appreciated.

Further update:
I had a look at the prevailing WP revision at the time I created my website, and in early 2008 WP was at version 2.3, which used latin1. More recent updates are using utf8.

I reviewed my database using phpMyAdmin and found that I have a mixture of latin1 and utf8mb4 charsets used in various tables. I will engage a database developer to assist me with correcting the problem following the Codex guidance: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Converting_Database_Character_Sets.

I will update again once we go through the conversion process…

I deeply studied my database and found my suspicions were correct. A mix of latin1 and utf8 character sets had been used in the database. With some assistance from a colleague, we converted the DB to utf8mb4 using the default utf8_general_ci collation.

Once the DB was tested and migrated back to the live site, the issues I had been having with non-English characters were solved.

I’ve kept the Insert Special Characters plugin because I’ve found it very helpful as I fix the missing special characters in the posts on my blog.