Strange Symbols Appearing in Early Posts

  • This issue is confined to Google Chrome, and it only affects posts published prior to 24 December 2009:

    It seems that all apostrophes, quotation marks, and em-dashes in my posts (but NOT in the headlines) have been replaced by strange symbols, as shown in this screenshot.

    Same issue when I use the default theme, so it doesn’t seem to be design-related.

    The strange thing is that the problem suddenly “ends” in late December 2009. I hadn’t used Chrome before, so it was only yesterday I noticed it.

    https://blog.cyberquill.com

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Moderator keesiemeijer

    (@keesiemeijer)

    It is a character set (utf8) encoding problem https://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/18/wordpress-charset-encoding-problem-after-upgrading-to-version-22/

    find these lines in your config.php:

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

    and comment them out like so:

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

    Thread Starter cyberquill

    (@cyberquill)

    Thanks. That took care of the problem in Chrome, but now I got this in Firefox, and simple squares in IE, Opera, and Safari. So overall, after commenting out these two lines, the problem got worse. (Before, the problem appeared only in Chrome. Now it affects all browsers except Chrome.)

    Again, it mainly concerns entries published until late 2009, and then only occasional occurrences of the weird characters, and they disappear entirely around April 2010.

    As per the mydigitallife.com argticle, the only other option is to try converting character set and collation in the WP Database, but that sounds complicated.

    Moderator keesiemeijer

    (@keesiemeijer)

    uncomment the define’s and go back to your old situation
    Can you see in phpmyadmin if the strange characters are also in the database wp_posts post_content table.
    I’ve changed my character set on my database once and it is very very complicated and time consuming. If the characters are in the database you can do a search and replace of these characters with this plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/search-regex/ . And that’s alot easier

    Thread Starter cyberquill

    (@cyberquill)

    I just cleared my Chrome cache to fix an unrelated issue, and as a side effect, all the weird symbols simply went away. (Yes, I had restored the two lines in wp-config I had commented out.) So the whole thing appeared to have been a simple caching problem.

    Although now everything is fine in all browsers on my local machine here, I suppose those weird characters may still display on other computers with uncleared caches.

    No weird symbols show up in wp_posts post_content in phpmyadmin.

    Thread Starter cyberquill

    (@cyberquill)

    PS: Less than 24 hours upon the strange characters disappearing after clearing my Chrome browser cache, the strange characters returned. Upon clearing the browser cache again, they disappeared again. Interesting.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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