rational

I found only two answers in other posts on this issue:
MySql Bug: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/55282?replies=14#post-303707
“escdotdot
Member

well, I have a solution to my prob. Apparently it’s a bug with mySQL 4.1

This post on another forum gave me the answer.

All I had to do was add the line:
mysql_query(“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”);
to the file /wp-includes/wp-db.php right after line 43 (where it makes the database connection).

This fixes posting and retrieving posts with accented characters. But I now have to go back through my posts and retype many of the accented characters (and some quote marks) as they seem to have permanently changed into different characters.”

AND:
“podz
Support Maven

It’s a character encoding problem.

Try this (I’m assuming you are on Windows)
Download and install notepad++
notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Use that to open your sql file
Find a faulty character – just check what it looks like
Now Select All
Then from the Format menu, choose ‘Encode in UTF-8’
If there is a change to the faulty character, the sql file is wrong
If there is not a change the new db is wrong

If the sql file is wrong, Save the newly encoded sql file and re-import.

If it’s the db, post back and we’ll see how to move forward.
Posted: 2005-11-23 11:24:21 # “

The first one didn’t really help as having to go back and cleanup the posts by hand is exactly what I’m trying to figure out how not to do. But this is what got mine fixed for now. Lucky I didn’t have hundreds of posts.

Answer two looks interesting though.

Anyone have the “final answer” to how to revert the database back to clean characters?
Dave

I have something that may help a bit.

I downloaded the free text editor called Note Tab Light and installed it. Then I just paste in any text I want to reformat into that.

Then I select all text (Ctrl+A) then choose Modify > Lines> split, then Modify> Lines> Join.

This restructures the whole document perfectly every time. Then I just cut and paste the whole thing back into WP and it looks and works perfectly.

This allows me to reformat text to be around 60 characters wide without doing it all by hand, line-by-line.

Regards,
Dave

I have something that may help a bit.

I downloaded the free text editor called Note Tab Light and installed it. Then I just paste in any text I want to reformat into that.

Then I select all text (Ctrl+A) then choose Modify > Lines> split, then Modify> Lines> Join.

This restructures the whole document perfectly every time. Then I just cut and paste the whole thing back into WP and it looks and works perfectly.

This allows me to reformat text to be around 60 characters wide without doing it all by hand, line-by-line.

Regards,
Dave

Thank you so much for your response. It got me much further along. I now only have to figure out what all those strange characters are appearing on my page.

I was able to drop all tables then import my database, but only after deleting DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1′ from about 5 spots in my database file.

My page is at https://www.daveelger.com if you’d like to take a look and see what I’m talking about as far as strange characters goes.

Here’s an example:

“1.? ? ? ? ? ? When athletes…”

or

“in the evening.? ? Follow this pattern for a few days and guess what?? Youa€?ll be a 3 or 4 pounds light!Ita€?s a common misconception that…”

I have to believe this is a difference in character sets between the hosts. E.g. my old host (Hostgator) and my new host (MyriadNetworks). Perhaps Hostgator is asian based and so using asian character sets? (utf8 perhaps?). I’m not sure. If they are, I wonder how to revert back?

I guess for now I’ll just go into each entry and clean them up. It’s fortunate I only have about a dozen posts right now on the old one. If I had hundreds this would be a different story and I’d definitely need a fix.

Well, hopefully someone will still answer this for the next guy who has this very same issue. Please answer now if you can as I’m very interested in the answer.

Regards,
Dave

Anyone can help me with this?
Thx in advance.