aka1337

Closing note..

I’m running my webserver on Centos 7 with ISPConfig3 and multiple php versions.
It seems the New Relic php agent caused this issue, still not identified what changes it did to cause it though.

Installed php8 but many of my wordpress sites or plugins aren’t compatible with this php version yet so I ended up reinstalling the php74 which resolved the issue.

First of all, I took a backup of php.ini and other configs in php74.
Then I removed it:
yum -y remove php74-*

And then I reinstalled it along with my required extensions:
yum install php74-php-{cli,fpm,mysqlnd,zip,devel,gd,mbstring,curl,xml,pear,bcmath,json}

Alright, seems like I’ve narrowed down the issue.
I noticed this happened on all my wordpress sites.

So I added PHP8 as an additional version to my webserver.
Switched a few of them to this version as this fresh version would not have been affected by my New Relic php agent installation.

Works as long as the site is running php8.

Will reach out to New Relic support to see why their php agent would cause utf issues.

Switching from PHP7.4 to 7.2 did not help.

Changing db collation from utf8_general_ci or utf8mb4_unicode_ci to utf8mb4_swedish_ci did not help either.

Uninstalled New Relic agent, no joy.

Looking at the database table content, I can see entries like “Spr?k” etc.
So it doesn’t seem to store these in the database as “broken” as they are presented.

Php settings:

default_charset = “UTF-8”
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.http_output = UTF-8
mbstring.detect_order = UTF-8

Seems like that was related to a plugin.

I mean this used to work just fine on the same site. If I perform a rollback of database and code to before I updated the menu, I can still see the special characters in the menu. But when saving the menu, it gets “destroyed”.

I will attempt to switch php version to a lower one. Doubt that’s the issue though.

Only other change has been to install new relic agent. I’ll try to uninstall that as well and see if it makes any difference.

It’s probably very obvious, but where and how do I best add these customizations?
And will they get overwritten when the plugin is updated?