WordPress fails to store non-english characters

Question

I have an issue with a friend's WordPress website I recently migrated to my personal web-server. I have never used WordPress besides setting up my blog (which runs fine). But with this website, I am having a hard time. It seems like every time we attempt to save a post or a page, the content gets saved as weird characters (boxes, question marks, etc).

Sounds like a pretty common issue people are having with WordPress but it's not. That's because the encoding issue only happens when saving something using the WordPress editor. For example, if I directly input greek characters via MySQL Workbench, they will be correctly displayed on the page. But if I edit the page, all non-english characters (even those that used to be displayed correctly), will be stored as gibberish. And by store I mean, I can see those characters looking like this: γιΠinside the wp_posts table.

So WordPress can read non-English characters from the database but it cannot write non-english characters to the database.

DB_COLLATE is set to utf8mb4_general_ci and DB_CHARSET to utf8mb4 .

MySQL Workbench reports the same for the database. My blog, that runs on the same server, using the same WordPress version and the same database, works fine.

Answer 1

Use utf8_decode and utf8_encode in save query method.

• http://php.net/manual/es/function.utf8-decode.php
• http://php.net/manual/es/function.utf8-encode.php

Answer 2

Open the file wp-config.php in the main directory of the website.

There is a line which should read define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4');

If not, change or add that.