Title: Crazy problem with character encoding.
Last modified: August 18, 2016

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# Crazy problem with character encoding.

 *  Resolved [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * (@richarley)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/)
 * Hi! My name is Richarley and I’m from Brazil. I have a big problem now with my
   blog (that i was still working and making some tests before let people know about):
   [http://www.underweb.com.br/richarley](http://www.underweb.com.br/richarley) .
 * I have been seeing a weird style in some texts of my page for a while, so after
   reading a bit from your docs about the “Reading Options SubPanel” I decided to
   try changing the page encoding format from utf-8 to utf-16, and everything gone
   crazy, with some crazy chinese like symbols and because of that I just can’t 
   change anything. My homepage and my admin panel are down now. I just tried to
   re-upload all my files, but the problem persists. I just don’t know what i can
   do know…
 * Please help me!

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

 *  [moshu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/moshu/)
 * (@moshu)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642555)
 * I have no idea where did you read to change it to utf-16. Don’t mess with things
   you don’t understand!
 * Can you login? If you manually overwrite the charactyer encoding in your browser(
   View > Encoding) you can access the pages. Change it back immediately to utf-
   8.
 * You can never change encoding on an existing blog!
 *  Thread Starter [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * (@richarley)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642558)
 * No, I can’t login… everything is down! 🙁
 *  [moshu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/moshu/)
 * (@moshu)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642561)
 * The last option would be to go to your database via phpMyadmin and in the wp_options
   table (or whatever your prefix is) find the **blog_charset** row and edit it 
   manually back to **UTF-8**.
 *  Thread Starter [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * (@richarley)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642568)
 * It worked!! But not on wp-options (that was ok, with UTF-8), but on richarley_options(
   where i found the blog_charset row with UTF-16). Thanks a lot!!
 *  [moshu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/moshu/)
 * (@moshu)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642570)
 * And when you edit your sidebar.php file make sure you save it with the right 
   encoding (utf-8). Even Notepad has that option > Save As… look at the bottom.
 * THAT is the reason you have crappy characters in your sidebar: it is always the
   user, not the script.
 *  Thread Starter [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * (@richarley)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642649)
 * Well, not everyone have to know about this encoding thing. Now that you said 
   to me i just saved with the right encoding with Notepad, but this option doesn’t
   appear to me using the dreamweaver. By the way, utf-8 is my default encoding 
   there too, but to know that i had to see at the program preferences…
 *  [moshu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/moshu/)
 * (@moshu)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642652)
 * DW should be used only in code mode – otherwise it will screw up your WP files.
 * (and I posted about saving the files with proper encoding zillion times…)
 *  Thread Starter [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * (@richarley)
 * [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642654)
 * Sorry, but today was the first time that i visited this forum… Well, at least
   you help me to solve my problem.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

The topic ‘Crazy problem with character encoding.’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [character](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/character/)
 * [encoding](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/encoding/)
 * [UTF-16](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/utf-16/)
 * [utf-8](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/utf-8/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 8 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [richarley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/richarley/)
 * Last activity: [18 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/crazy-problem-with-character-encoding/#post-642654)
 * Status: resolved

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