Special characters in WordPress UTF-8

I have a problem regarding special characters that are appearing messed up on the front-end . mainly the get converted to question marks, or something like �?)

Example - Frédèric becomes Fr�d�ric.

some facts that made me puzzled:

  • This WP install is on LOCAL machine, and shares the server with at
    least 40 other installs - none of which have this problem.

  • This WP install shares also the same DB as the others .

  • My wp-config file has the collate and charset defined.

  • The DB seems fine , because when I am viewing the post in the EDITOR (back end) - all is correct , the problem is only on the FRONT end .

    • The DB seems fine (2) , opening the post in phpMyAdmin and checking the direct value - all characters are fine .

  • This problem is NOT a browser/os encoding , it was checked in 4
    different machines, 3 OS, and 9 browsers..

I have tried all the solutions which I know from past experience, which include :

  • checking the wp-config (it is ok, utf-8 defined, collate ok)
  • Checking the DB - all UTF-8
  • checking my header (?php bloginfo('charset'); ?) - that renders correctly as utf-8 with valid markup.
  • Open all theme files in my editor, convert encoding to UTF-8 without bom and save.

Did i missed something ? Any Ideas ??

Topic htmlspecialchars-decode characters database Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

Are you using htmlentities() to escape your output by any chance? If so you need to define 'UTF-8' as the third parameter.

1
answered at

Edit:

Do you have <meta charset="utf-8" /> in your <head> tag? A user here fixed a similar problem with character encoding by adding this.

There are actually many Google results that come up searching for utf-8 character encoding in wordpress.

Also, does pasting the text into the HTML view of the editor and saving it make any difference?

Below is not such a good idea as @toscho explained in comments.

I am not sure if this is the best method to fix the problem but this worked for one of my clients' websites.

Find these two lines in your wp-config.php file:

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

And comment them out like so:

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

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