the special characters just suddenly disappear!

I think you should ask/contact your host whether they made any modification (upgrade) on the server that might caused this.

Do they disappear as you’re typing? Or from the blog after you’ve posted?

they don’t show.. I type them… and they are there, because when I edit the post they appear in the box to edit it, but in the index.php they don’t show not even in the preview in the post.php
I don’t have support from the host.. it is a free host from globalweb.com.ru ??

Go to Options/Reading after logging in. What is your “Encoding for pages and feeds” set at? UTF-8 is recommended.

Yes, it is in UFT-8, it has always been.
the don’t show, not that they are changed by some weird ones..

If you have WP set for UTF-8, your page is not reflecting it. I see in the header:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Go into your index.php and make sure that line is the following:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

Did you turn on a plugin like textile or so ? If yes, try without….

And check your .htaccess file. Make sure you don’t have a default charset set for the directory.

I’m gonna try what Kafkaesqui said.. but i don’t think taht should work… cuz it’s been always that way.. and in the preview page in post.php they don’t show neither…
I have textile 2 activate.. but I don’t think that is it… cuz it worked before…
I don’t have a .htacess file
let my try… I’ll be back to tell you
thanx so much for all the help

so.. I change the header… but that didn’t work..
then I desactivate the plugin.. textile2.0… and that’s it!!!!!! ??
It used to work fine but it seens that a change in the server cause the problem.
I received an email from globalweb.com.ru that said:
GlobalWeb has turned one year now, serving thousands of free web hosting sites.
For that we have we have made major updates/improvements over the past few days.
thanx for all your help.. my blog is now just great!!!!

Textile 1 and 2 both swallow non-ascii characters. I just fixed it myself on my Norwegian blog (where ‘?|’, ‘??’ and ‘?￥’ disappeared).
More specifically, the encode_high() function is the culprit.
The simple and dirty fix is to comment the line that runs this function, e.g. for Textile 1:

…
if (function_exists(‘mb_encode_numericentity’)) {
#$text = encode_high($text);
} else {
…

This is line 60, the file is wp-content/plugins/textile1.php
I really don’t understand why you need encode_high() at all. My blog seems perfectly fine without it… But I haven’t bothered to investigate it too much, now that it works for me.
HTH,
[email protected]

Just out of curiousity: does it mean if I don’t use (=activate) any of the textile plugins I won’t run into this problem?
Also for my “collection” can you post the commented part here (in between backticks)?
Thx.

> Just out of curiousity: does it mean if I don’t use (=activate) any of
> the textile plugins I won’t run into this problem?
Yeah, I guess. At least it does for me. Have you tried?
As for the other question, I really don’t understand that backtick business, thats why I used the “blockquote” elmement in my first post.
Heres what you have to do: Take a look at the file I mentioned, and scroll down to line 60, and put a “#” in front of the line with the function call (like I did in the post). Save. That’s it.
HTH,
[email protected]

Thanks for the answer 1.
And as for 2. – I should have taken a better look at it ??
No, I have never tried those plugins, I just didn’t feel the need to use them. I do not have activated any of the included plugins. Did I miss anything? ??

I guess it depends on how you write your texts. If you frequently use markup, it’s a real lifesaver not having to type all those html elements which where never meant for humans to use anyway. Let the machines do that, and we can write more ??
For me, Textile is very important. But if you mostly write plain text I guess you can do pretty good without.