characters coming across as “???”

blog is: https://mymicroisv.com/

And, now I’m getting: “Many is the time Ia€?ve seen ” ?!?!

Help!!

Did you write this on a wordpressor first?

taken from https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmymicroisv.com%2F:

This error can also be triggered by formatting characters embedded in documents by some word processors. If you use a word processor to edit your HTML documents, be sure to use the “Save as ASCII” or similar command to save the document without formatting information.

The posts are days, weeks months old and were OK when posted. some were done in the wp editor, some in text ed., some in word – but they are all being served now with these weird characters (a€?) or as “???”

Did you change your theme recently? Or add plugins?

Theme not changed – reactivated ultimate tag warrior pluggin.

Has anything changed recently? ANYthing at all? Has your host made any changes or upgrades to php or mysql?

Options -> Reading: What is your encoding type set as?

I checked his html output, and he has <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />, and I also checked the content type in the http header, and it’s utf8 as well.

There could be an issue with mysql. If his isp upgraded that recently, perhaps that’s the source of the problem.

My ISP says: version 5.0.19 of MySQL.

did they change it recently? we’re looking for what changed so we know where you concentrate our efforts.

The server has been running since april… so I don’t think so. The only change I’ve made was updating to WP 2.0.3 about a week ago. That was a few days before I noticed this problem…

Anyone have code to do an update query to fix the data – it is not a display issue, the actual characters in the data are messed up!

Are you saying that if you fix the characters, the fix stays? And btw, you don’t need to restart a linux server when you do upgrades. You merely restart the particular service. Uptimes do not necessarily reflect when upgrades last happened.

I don’t know of code that will search and replace through your tables. You could export your database table, and use a wordprocessor to do a search and replace on the munged characters, then empty and reimport the table. Backup your database first before you go messing with it in such a way. If you have phpmyadmin, you could be able to export and import your data without a problem.

Before I go correct hundreds of posts, I want to find out why it happened and how to prevent it in the future! Any recommendations? Any plugins known for this kind of behavior?

You never answered the question (which has been asked repeatedly!) – did your host made an update recently to their database version? Did they upgrade any other software on the server?

It seems there is a plugin to do a search and replace.

https://thedeadone.net/?p=183