Every single time I have to upgrade WordPress, it messes with my Chinese characters! The characters (be it Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai etc) show up as question marks ‘??? ‘or funny symbols ‘所‘. It’s not too much of a difference to me since 99% of my posts are in English, but it still bugs me if I don’t have the choice to write with Chinese characters.
As you can imagine, I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and the upgrade messed with my Chinese characters again. And again, I forget how I fixed the problem…
I thought I better write this post for my own sanity. And hopefully it’ll save me a whole lot of time and tinkering!
As per usual, I went to WordPress > Support to look up the … erm, I had trouble with logging in because I forgot my password again (but you can still view the topics without logging in). I could also write up another rant about how crappy (navigation-wise) WordPress Support Forum is, but I’ll leave that for another day.
This time around I stumbled across a blog post, by boringest, detailing the steps I should take to fix this problem. um… it didn’t take me long to give up and realise it wasn’t working the way I wanted. I think this post is about changing the admin dashboard into Chinese characters (I’m not sure because I gave up when I couldn’t differentiate between my brother’s database and mine …)
Anyway, the easiest and only effective way which I found time and time again (I did exactly the same thing the other times) is to:
- Find your wordpressconfig.php file
- Open it up (to edit it)
- Find and delete:
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8?);
define('DB_COLLATE'=, "); - Save
It’s probably one of the most common things that happens, and I don’t understand why WordPress doesn’t just leave those lines out? Then again, everyone probably already has the answer to this problem, and I’m the only one complaining because I’m just too much of a noob…
