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 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. cheers, Stewart