On 01/12/2021 08:05, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
On 2021-11-29 16:25, Jamon Camisso via talk wrote:
Another thing to try is using mysqli_set_charset("UTF8"); somewhere in your site's code. Substitute in different character sets until you find the correct one ...
Thanks, Jamon, but there isn't a valid encoding for what my database seems to be holding. It was UTF-8, and now it's seemingly UTF-8 decoded to CP1252 bytes re-encoded to UTF-8 characters again.
If WordPress were using Python (it's not), if my db held the 4 character, 6 byte UTF-8 string, the equivalent Python code to end up in the mess I'm in is:
>>> bytes(bytes("côté",encoding='utf-8').decode(encoding='cp1252'), encoding='utf-8') b'c\xc3\x83\xc2\xb4t\xc3\x83\xc2\xa9'
or 6 characters / 10 bytes of gibberish ('côté'). Since that encoding is reversible, can you attempt it on some of the corrupted posts/pages? e.g.
bytes(bytes('côté', encoding='utf-8').decode(), encoding='cp1252').decode() 'côté'
Since this happened in the last month or so, it's not really a legacy encoding issue. Perfectly good UTF-8 got destroyed with no input/changes from me.
I'd been fairly careful with backups for the first decade of running this blog, but the process got wearing after a while, especially since every update went flawlessly so the manual backup process was a waste of time. Wordpress offers automatic updates without forcing a backup checkpoint, which I think is wrong.
Is it a managed Wordpress? That's terribly bad sounding if it is. Worse I suppose if Wordpress itself just did it. Do any of the casting suggestions on that link that I sent fix it? Or are you going to have to dump each row and run them through that double-decoding process? Jamon