weird characters with 2.7 update

sorry wrong link- the blog is https://www.atheismsfallacies.com/blog

Hi, the blog got hacked. Go to the site and check the source code. Right after the body tag, you should see alot of lines that look like:

<u style='display:none'><a href="https://www.olathekids.org/awstats/post.php?p=7-20927">Free Mobil Ringtone Virgin</a> <a href="https://www.olathekids.org/awstats/post.php?p=7-3269">Alexisonfire Ringtone</a> <a href="https://www.olathekids.org/awstats/post.php?p=7-14337">Motorola Hi Fi Ringtone</a> <a href="https://www.olathekids.org/awstats/post.php?p=7-16587">The Game This Is How We Do Ringtone</a>

I checked your source and it’s riddled with this.

Well, I figured it out… just in case anyone else needs to know all I did was go to my phpMyAdmin and check the database for the Collation. In my database it happens to be latin1_swedish_ci I have no idea why but that’s what it said… So I opened wp_config.php and added the Collation code to it as follows:

The following line was left blank by default:
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

I simply changed it to:
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ‘latin1_swedish_ci’);

and uploaded it and it fixed the problem.

I hope that helps others.

Here’s a link with some info:

https://www.dailyblogtips.com/make-sure-your-wordpress-is-not-hacked/

OK — mine does this since upgrading to 2.7. It’s not hacked. However, like brandonsnhl, my Collation is latin1)swedish_ci. But his fix doesn’t fix it. Instead, implementing his fix changes the weird character to a black diamond with a white questionmark in it ( ? ) in FireFox and into a square in IE7.

Any thoughts?

That’s an encoding error.

Check your encoding settings in your Dashboard ( Settings > Reading > Encoding ) and check the encoding set in your header:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

I’m having a similar problem. I upgraded 8 blogs from 2.6.5 to 2.7 and all went fine except the one with the most posts (400+). At first I had the same problem with “?” in the text, but after changing my wp-config.php from “define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);” to “define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ‘utf8_general_ci’);” this removed most of them. Now the only problems remaining are with ‘ showing up as “a€?”, (like in “Ia€?ll”), and left” showing up as “a€?” with right” showing up as “a€?”, (like in “a€?My Favoritesa€?”).

Any ideas on these types of errors?

It’s all related to unicode encoding. I’ve run into this on several different sites and haven’t found any magic fix…use google and you’ll find lots of discussions about this on virtually all php/mysql apps.

I would recommend ensuring your database, all the tables in the database, your config.php file, and the encoding in your dashboard are all set to utf8 encoding. Then make sure the strange characters are not showing up in your new posts. If you still have them in your old posts, then you could dump your database, do a find/replace to clean them out and then import it back.

Everything is set to utf8. I’m not getting these weird charactures in new posts, just the old ones.

Part of the problem may be that I moved this site from a shared server to a dedicated one (had to create a new MySQL database) and exported all my tables (each one seperatly) and imported them to the new database. I had to have my hosting company import the posts table for me as they have a 2 MB limit on self-importing of tables and this one was 7 MB+. That table shouldn’t be that large except for the new auto-save feature has caused so many revisions that the table size is about 10 times larger than it should be. I’ve installed a plugin that turns off the auto-save but I’m concerned that if I do the same for the revisions and try to clean out all the extra records that I’ll screw the table up. My host takes about 24 hours to do the import so don’t want to be a day behind in comments, etc.

dbmartin — Thanks — my encoding is set to UTF-8. My header is fine to.

Thanks for trying. I have about 300 posts and am not savy enough to massage the data in bulk.

After upgrading from 2.6.7 to 2.7.0, I’m having the same problem with the weird characters showing up. Anyone else have suggestions?

My settings in the database are all UTF-8, wp-config.php is correct, the meta tag in the header also has the correct charset.

I did NOT set the define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ‘utf8_general_ci’); in the wp-config.php because I don’t think that’s the problem.

I am having the same problems with any page document in which the content originally came from a microsoft word document!

Click any link on this page to see the symbols coming up:
https://little-hypotenuse.com/papers

Early today, everything was fine.
Then I upgraded to 2.7.

What to do???

Nevermind!!!

Brandon’s fix actually DID work for me.

Thank you ??

jenn – brandon’s fix worked in some instances for me but in other instances, turned things into black diamonds like shields mentions above.

Brandon,

Thank you so very much for your helpful post. It gave me insight to fix my issue:

Feedburner was parsing corrupted characters of my feeds. The fix, based on your solution, was go to PHPMyAdmin and alter the database for wp-posts, which in my case was latin1_swedish_ci, to utf8_unicode_ci.

Once again, thanks for your very helpful post!