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 http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/
Once activated, I was able to “replace” odd characters like  and †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 http://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
