Strange characters appearing in wordpress

Question

I'm having a niggling wordpress problem

Whenever i'm adding an Apostrophe to a wordpress post I create

'

Its saving as a strange set of characters

’

I've used wordpress many times, never encountered this problem

I've uninstalled every single plugin, and the problem remains

I read somewhere to comment out these lines in wp-config.php but it doesn't help for new posts

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Can someone help me? DO need to set the Charset to override somewhere? How??

Answer 1

I have to update the thread, as follows. I followed just about every tutorial out there addressing utf-8 mismatch, nothing helped Finally we spotted some phishing code had been injected into the root index file (also linked to some 3rd party adult site, but our site was not redirecting , Needless to say, we cleaned that up Many thanks for everyone for helping, especially @user850010 I hope This thread will be useful for others

Answer 2

If that strange character is stored in DB, then it seems that your DB is not set up with the UTF8 charset, so you can uncomment those 2 lines in wp-config.php, since they are not the source of the problem.

You have a comprehensive tutorial how to convert Character Sets with WordPress Database but here is the short list what to do:

• Make a backup of your DB

• Maybe it would be better make a copy of your site on your local computer and try the below changes there

• Convert DB (this will not affect existing tables, just those future new created tables)

  ALTER DATABASE MyDb CHARACTER SET utf8;

• convert any tables in the database that are not already in the desired format.

  Focus on the tables wp_posts and wp_postmeta

  ALTER TABLE wp_posts CHARACTER SET utf8

  ALTER TABLE wp_postmeta CHARACTER SET utf8

• individually alter each column of each table to use the correct the character set. This is not a simple process, read carefully the section of above link regarding columns.

Answer 3

Run this query:

ALTER DATABASE MyDb CHARACTER SET utf8;

After edit wp_config.php and set:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');