Problem with UTF8. italian/russian characters

Question

I'm using an RSS feed importer. When i preview the feed, the special characters such as è,à and so on are throwing out gibberish.

Searching on the WP.org forum I came across the suggestion to add the code below to the wp-config file.

Adding the code hasn't made any difference at all. My DB is in utf-8 format.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');           // force utf8
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8_general_ci');    // force collation

Any suggestions on this please? As I cannot add new tags (encoding/utf) putting this to the nearest available tag.

Defining 'gibberish'

è is displayed as � ì is displayed as �¬ and so on

Answer 1

The content you get is not utf-8 encoded or the encoding is damaged by the importer. Usually SimplePie – the feed reader WordPress uses – is quite good at handling such cases. I wonder what an importer you use …

Anyway, I’ve written a function to enforce utf-8 output. You should implement this very early in the import process. The article is in German – let me know if I should add more explanations here.