WP 2.2.1: Dots, Comma, Quotes became Junk

I did the upgrade to 2.2 and this character was added “?” after every punctuation mark. It happened on ‘pages’ and on ‘posts’.

It happened on two of my blogs.

I really feel stupid posting to this forum really. Hardly anyone replies to the issues, I had all my previous posts unanswered. Does anyone from WP ever listen to these cries?

We do what we can. (And a lot of your questions did get replies.) Doesn’t help when folks post the same questions over and over again that can be answered with a simple search. (That’s not directed at you, just in general.)

Somehow your mysql database got encoded. Not sure how that could have occured with an upgrade. What version of wp were you upgrading from?

My upgrade to 2.2 was from 2.0. I had no problems with the upgrade, because I haven’t made any changes with the source.

I only posted here, because I came looking for a solution before I tried upgrading my big blog. That’s when I ran across debashish’s post with a similar problem.

I guess it would be easier to do a search and replace on the text, but I thought about “sharing” some info on possible problems.

Hm. I only see those gibberish characters in the source code.

In my experience, this is usually caused by cut/pasting from a word processor (like Microsoft Word) which embeds printer characteristics for which there is no Web coding equivalent.

There was no cut/paste on my blogs. They were totally generated from the WordPress editor.

I have since found pages that have 10 or more duplicate references in the source to images that are on the page. I’m having to delicately edit out these dupes from the source.

The “conversion/upgrade” process stinks for me.

I have similar problem when I upgraded from 2.1.3 to WP 2.2.0 by Fantastico. All Chinese character plus the characters that mentioned above have changed to junk characters. I used wordpress editor all the times for input and used unicode UTF8 in reading and writing too.

https://davinachan.com/blog

Unfortunately, when I tried to restore the backup (based on Bluehost’s Fantastico limited guideline), it didn’t work and I lost a couple of posts too in the process of backup, upgrade, again and again. I really need some expert help here. I am stuck. My wife blames me to migrate the whole blog to WordPress. She would prefer to use Yahoo!

One more finding from my restore/upgrade process. Using the same SQL/XML file of my posts, I have the right character at 2.1.3 but junks at 2.2.0. Hope this helps to analysis my problem. Thanks.

People, first of all apologies for the outburst I had for this forum. I guess we should do a thorough search for problems before we even post coz the answers are already there most of the times.

The solution to this issue is mentioned at other forum posts like this one.

Just comment out (or suitably modify) the following two lines, as shown, in your wp-config.php file. I also upgraded my Hindi blog and with the DB Collation specified everything appeared as junk. For me this was the fix.

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Thanks and Regards.

Thanks debashish for the info. However, for a dummy of WordPress like me, it is difficult to identify the right keywords and search for the answer from the forum or database. So really appreciate that you come back to this discussion thread and provide me the link. So yet to see if the link will help me resolve my problem which is Chinese charater display, although I believe it should be the same issue.

It works! Even for a dummy like me. Many thanks. My baby blog can be saved from being moved to Yahoo!