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…
Thanks.
I’m having the same problem right now and this defintely is God sent.
Cheers.
[...] WordPress it messed up all my Chinese characters. Happily, it was easily fixed. I found the answer here. Thanks so much Selina for sharing your solution. 包明光 in Site pages at January 24 2009 [...]
Awesome, thanks for the tip
yeah, for whole night i have been scratching my head to work a few hours on the ‘worms’. finally it just need to delete these 2 sentences then my chinese story is back. Don;t know how to express my feeling. ANyway yjanks a lot Selina….
after change, still the same
@Mr.Dream refer to the wp support forum (link above)
Thanks a lot! I was having trouble with the forums too! I found a database converter plugin, but it didn’t support the version I had.
真係唔該你呀！
Or if you are learning Mandarin: 謝謝你
I’ve had this problem too many times. I’ve tried the database converter. I usually end up rolling back, to 2.7.1 after trying to upgrade to WordPress 2.9 and now 3.0.1 and losing all my precious 漢字
[...] characters. Luckily after three fruitless days of updating and rolling back there appears to be a simple fix to the Asian text turned to gibberish upon WordPress upgrade [...]
Hi,
Just a note.
If you have configured your collate and charset to the proper settings, which in this case will most likely be UTF8, taking out charset and collate in config.php actually screw things up by causing readable chinese unreadable.
hi zibin,
how do you configure the collate and charset?
this post is quite old and I’ve upgraded wordpress multiple times without any problems so far