Weird characters after export – but everything's already UTF-8?!

  • Hi,

    A friend’s WP install (which he hadn’t been running updates on and which was still on WordPress 3! D:) was compromised over the weekend. I exported the post data as XML and imported it into a brand new local install of WP 4.4.2, streamlined the plugins, updated the theme, and was generally patting myself on the back for cleaning things up.

    Today I exported the site back to the live host, and every single special character is showing up as a diamond with a question mark in it. It was not doing this in the local version.

    Google suggested this seems to be a common problem, to do with an incorrect character set, most likely latin1, but I have tried:

    • changing the DB_CHARSET in wp-config to latin1
    • changing the DB_COLLATE in wp-config to latin1
    • commenting out the DB_CHARSET in wp-config entirely
    • commenting out the DB_COLLATE in wp-config entirely
    • running UTF8ize
    • Exporting with Duplicator
    • Exporting manually

    None of these have any effect and the question marks continue to show. I have done a search in the database for the string ‘latin1’ and got no results. Everything already appears to be in UTF-8 format.

    I wasn’t sure if this could be caused by having imported posts from a very old version of WordPress, but I didn’t export the database or anything to do with the filesystem itself, just an XML file into a fresh install, and the fact that the special characters are rendering in the price dropdowns (which are rendered from shortcodes by the WP Paypal Cart plugin) makes me think it’s not to do with that.

    The characters look normal in the post_content field of wp_posts when I try to edit them.

    Is it possible this is on my web host’s end somehow? Is there something I’ve missed?

    Any help would be very much appreciated – I’m entirely out of ideas and am not sure what to do.

    The live site is here (apologies, NSFW language on some posts, not my content!) and a good example of the broken special characters is here (SFW).

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • This could well be an issue on your hosts end, have you tried contacting them and asking them if they know of any solution? If not, let us know and I’ll keep searching for a solution.

    Thread Starter Emma_W

    (@emma_w)

    The host has been spectacularly unhelpful so far (I’ve never heard ‘it works on my machine’ so much from a tech support team before!) so I didn’t want to contact them if it was something I could fix myself – it’s useful to hear that it looks as if it might indeed be on their end. I have contacted them and let them know and will update as soon as they get back to me, thank you.

    Let me know what they say, It’s very unfortunate to hear that the host is so unhelpful.

    I’m sorry to hear that but keep me posted.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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