Tag editor silently discards edits when invalid char entered in description

Thank you for reporting an issue with WP. Please provide an example of what invalid character you tried to enter into a tag description so we can replicate your experience and work out a solution.

If the forum editor also exhibits the same behavior, you may need to describe in detail what you tried to enter instead of an exact copy of what you entered.

Thanks for your reply. Trying to paste the carachter here:

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It’s the smiley above. Let me know if that’s good enough for testing.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by uncovery.

I didn’t have any trouble using smilies in category descriptions on my test site. I simply copied yours and pasted it into the term’s description field.

I’m not sure if it’d matter, but are your DB collations set for some variant of utf8mb4_*? The mb4 means 4 byte character code support, which is what smilies are. The other utf8 collations without mb4 are for up to 3 byte support only. My understanding is the lack of mb4 only affects the ordering of results, it shouldn’t cause errors AFAIK. All the same, your DB collations are best set to some utf8mb4 variant.

If you continue to have difficulty, it’s likely due to interference from your theme or a plugin. If you deactivate all plugins and switch to a default theme, you should be able to save descriptions with smilies. FWIW, I tested with Twenty Twenty-one and no plugins active.