UTF8 Sanitize

There are times when little problems pop up using WordPress that you just might not expect. Most users don’t know or care about what character encoding their computer and browser are using but when that character encoding is different from what WordPress uses it can lead to some odd problems.

Usually the tell tale sign of a character encoding problem is the appearance of odd characters in a WordPress post. Boxes where there should be characters or quotation marks that look odd. Sometimes there might not be any visible signs of a problem, but certain pages just do not seem to load properly. It can be a frustrating and confusing problem because you just don’t quite know what is going on.

If you have had this kind of problem odds are if you copy the content of your post in text mode over to a plain text editor, my favourite is Bluefish these days, you might be able to actually see the characters that have the problem and fix them. You can then copy and paste the content back to WordPress.

If you don’t want to go through that trouble and you have this problem regularly take a look at UTF8 Sanitize. It is an older plugin but so far it does seem to work still with the new WordPress. It takes the content of your post and tries to remove the non UTF8 characters.

If you do have this problem regularly you might want to check your computer character encoding settings or the editor you usually write in. It can be a hard problem to find the solution to fixing but once you do your WordPress posting will be easy once again.