Weird characters appearing on WordPress posts
If weird characters suddenly appear on your blog posts and pages. Don’t panic.
You may see Don’t instead of Don’t for instance. This can happen when a database is restored or updated because the character set has been changed
Here are some common examples…
“ = left quote = “
†= right quote = ”
‘ = left single quote = ‘
’ = right single quote = ’
— = en dash = –
– = em dash = —
• = hyphen = –
… = ellipsis = …
If you know how to use PHPMyAdmin, you can use these simple queries to sort it out(assuming your database prefix is wp_)
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '“', '"'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'â€', '"'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '’', '''); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '‘', '''); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'â€"', '–'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'â€"', '—'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '•', '-'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '…', '…'); UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'Â', ' '); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '“', '"'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, 'â€', '"'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '’', '''); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '‘', '''); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, 'â€"', '–'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, 'â€"', '—'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '•', '-'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '…', '…'); UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, 'Â', ' ');
If you have no idea how to do that, here’s a simple £2.50 plugin for you to do the job. You are advised to backup your database first just in case.
Once you have paid above you will get a link to download weird-character-fixer.zip. Then goto your website dashboard and click on Plugins, then Add New, then Upload and finally Activate. A menu item “Weird Chara Fixer” will appear. Best practice is to backup your WordPress database using the plugin link for safety and then click Fix Now. Hope it helps you – I just fixed a site for a client with 55,000 posts and 16,000 had been corrupted!