Having a problem with character encoding

  • Resolved WebbsAtWork

    (@webbsatwork)


    10 years, 3 months ago

    I’ve searched the boards and can’t find an answer to this. I migrated the following site from Media Temple’s grid to a DV:

    http://mineralpointschools.org/

    Character encoding wasn’t an issue beforehand. However, many special characters (i.e. emdashes, open and close quotes, ellipsis) now show up as question marks. I’ve checked the encoding of the database the HTML, and the file encoding; all are consistently utf8. All of the characters show up fine in the editor on the backend, and in the database.

    Here’s another oddity that might have something to do with it. Wherever the_content() is called from the database, a new <DOCTYPE!> tag is being added, along with <html> and <body> tags. The doctype tags aren’t in the database, but they are being added to the HTML source.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter WebbsAtWork

    (@webbsatwork)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    This is a better example of characters blowing out:

    http://mineralpointschools.org/mpsd/attendance-policy/

    FYI, none of this stuff happened on the prior server, only since I migrated it. I was running the same version of WordPress on the previous server as well.

    MarkRH

    (@markrh)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    That’s odd. I looked at the page and it’s not a character encoding issue on the browser’s end as it is detecting the page as UTF-8. Those question marks are actually question marks in the source code. The ASCII code of the character is 63.
    r child?s absence

    So, it would seem that something within the code itself is changing these characters if they are in fact not question marks when editing the post before the browser sees it.

    I’d start to disable all your plugins to see if one of them is causing it.

    Thread Starter WebbsAtWork

    (@webbsatwork)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Mark,

    Thank you for your help, and apologies in waiting a couple of days in replying. The embarrassing thing is, this was totally self-inflicted.

    The short story is, I wrote and installed a filter that used mb_convert_encoding in my functions.php file. It worked fine on the grid product, but quit working when I sent it over. I removed it from the filter, and that was the problem. Once I removed the filter, everything started working great again. I’ve yet to install PHP Multibyte on this server, but at least I know what the problem was.

    Thanks again for your help!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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