Stray chars inserted in old posts after 2.6 upgrade

Well…I did some investigating, and surmising that this was a character encoding issue, I commented out the line in wp-config.php that says

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

That fixed the problem. I don’t know if it is a long term fix though because they editor might be storing the posts in UTF-8, and leaving the charset unspecified could cause problems. Does anyone know how to convert the existing posts in the DB to UTF-8?

Steve

I had the exact same issue after upgrading from 2.1.X to 2.6 tonight and found this post. You were correct – commenting out that define statement seems to remove the stray characters in the posts.

Kind of strange. Unfortunately I don’t have time to troubleshoot as to why this was happening because this was a blog that a customer was paying me to manage – not the blog their domain/website, the blog just happens to reside on the site.

I hope the good people at WordPress take note that this is definitely happening and not to just 1 person.

I have done some posts since commenting out that line and there are no ill effects. Kind of makes me wonder why it was put in there to begin with.

I wasn’t able to delete this line: define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’); without affecting my new posts after the upgrade. I have also converted my database from latin1 to utf8 in the meantime, but it didn’t help the old posts.

I finally downloaded the Search and Replace plugin https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/

Once activated, I was able to “replace” odd characters like ? and a€ by leaving the “with” box blank in the case of double spaces after a full stop (I learned how to type old school and can’t break the habit) or by inserting the correct symbol (ie. & % or whatever character was being replaced by the weird characters) and clicking the “go” button.

Worked like a charm.

This chart helped find some of those codes https://www.web-source.net/symbols.htm

Awesome! Thanks for all of the great info and links.

I still have one problem The special character “?” is not being replaced. I have tried using the WordPress search and replace plug-in as well as hand coding it into MySQL. I can do all the other symbols except that one. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ashton

Ashton – take a look at my blog, I believe I may have found a permanent solution to this, if your setup is like mine.

Let me know if you have any questions… I know what a pain this special character has been for all of us!!

cormanaz….

You are a legend.

I’ve been trying to work this out for about 3 or 4 hours and with your simple fix it’s now sorted.

infinisource, your way’s a bit to difficult for relative newbies like me, but what do i know!

Thanks guys. You’re the best