How do I remove weird characters in text?

Question

Help, my site is suddenly populated with weird characters, like this:

“Do what you love and do it often,†“If you don’t like your job, quit,†and “Travel often; Getting lost will help you find yourself.â€

What do I do to remove it?

Link to Website.

Answer 1

It appears that the site is still using the Unicode character set from the page header, but the database may have been corrupted. Ask Linode for a backup restore and/or if they changed anything with their MySQL servers.

If you don't run your own regular database backups, you should. Try WordPress › WP-DB-Backup « WordPress Plugins.

You can also use phpmyadmin at Linode to check the collation of the database and repair it. Or use WordPress › Portable phpMyAdmin « WordPress Plugins from inside the WP admin.

Answer 2

You can try commenting out the encoding type in the wp-config. Sometimes that works.

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

//define('DB_COLLATE','utf8_unicode_ci');