How do I remove weird characters in text?

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Help, my site is suddenly populated with weird characters, like this:

“Do what you love and do it often,†“If you don’t like your job, quit,†and “Travel often; Getting lost will help you find yourself.â€

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What do I do to remove it?

Link to Website.

Here's an example.

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4 comments

  1. You can try commenting out the encoding type in the wp-config. Sometimes that works.

    //define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);

    //define(‘DB_COLLATE’,’utf8_unicode_ci’);

  2. It appears that the site is still using the Unicode character set from the page header, but the database may have been corrupted. Ask Linode for a backup restore and/or if they changed anything with their MySQL servers.

    If you don’t run your own regular database backups, you should. Try WordPress › WP-DB-Backup « WordPress Plugins.

    You can also use phpmyadmin at Linode to check the collation of the database and repair it. Or use WordPress › Portable phpMyAdmin « WordPress Plugins from inside the WP admin.

  3. I found this post which gave me desired results… This can be remove simply by running a short SQL query on your WordPress database, using the command line client or PhpMyAdmin.

    Here’s a solution copy/pasted from this link

    Always keep a backup copy of your database before you make any changes.

    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '“', '“');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'â€', '”');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '’', '’');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '‘', '‘');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '—', '–');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '–', '—');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '•', '-');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '…', '…');

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '“', '“');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, 'â€', '”');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '’', '’');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '‘', '‘');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '—', '–');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '–', '—');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '•', '-');
UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = REPLACE(comment_content, '…', '…');

  4. In addition to the above, I was still having the problem in front of the “read more” links on summary pages. Below is what fixed it for me, so I’m posting it here in case anyone else has this exact same scenario.

    I’m totally shocked. After hours of trying things and testing, I finally found the “Settings” then “Readings” option below: “Encoding for pages and feeds”. After changing from UTF-7 to UTF-8, everything looks good again.

    enter image description here

    And even stranger, after changing it to UTF-8, the option disappears from the page. According to WordPress site, this option was removed since release 3.5.