On update to 3.04 site started recording accents as “á” and “á”, what to do?

Question

One day my site worked perfectly and the next it suddenly started to have trouble recording accented characters. The problem affects posts' body, if I submit a post with an accent on the title it records it correctly.

However if I put it on the post's content instead of recording "casá" the posts "Casá" and if I edit it, it says "casá"

It's causing havok on my site because it's very "search based" and searches no longer work. I really don't know what to do. Anyone has experienced something like this before or has any idea of how to fix it? Or as a last resort is there a way to turn everything to us characters?

Answer 1

Lisandro, in case you are still having these issues - or anyone else ends up on this page - the following. Like Jan pointed out these issues have to do with the charsets.

In most cases the charset definition in wp-config.php must be UTF8, just like the variable for charset in wp admin read settings. Collation will normally not be set in wp-config.php, which leads to the default utf8_general_ci to be used.

Note that charset and collation are also set on several levels in your database. As for plugins and themes: most important thing to check is whether a meta tag with charset definitions is added to the head of your pages.

In your cases you can consider to change the collation to utf8_unicode_ci for its better sorting performance. Best to have someone with working knowledge to do this.

Fairly good information on this can be found at http://codex.wordpress.org/Converting_Database_Character_Sets

Cheers, Peter