Character encoding issue (UTF-8) on my site (teseeantitese.wordpress.com)

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  sintese · Member · Aug 3, 2026 at 11:05 am

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  Hello,

  I am experiencing a character encoding / UTF-8 issue on my free site: https://teseeantitese.wordpress.com/

  Special characters in Portuguese (accents, ç, em-dashes, and quotation marks) are rendering as broken characters across the site.

  Since this is hosted on a free WordPress.com plan, I do not have direct access to wp-config.php, the database collation settings, or SFTP files to fix the charset manually.

  Could a staff member please check the site’s database/collation settings or help re-encode the affected content to UTF-8?

  Thank you for your help!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  sudheerdungaofficial · Member · Aug 4, 2026 at 6:40 am

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  Here is a helpful, structured response tailored for this forum thread that addresses the character encoding issue on WordPress.com:Understanding the Issue

  On WordPress.com free plans, WordPress handles database encodings and character sets (UTF-8) automatically at the server level. Because file access (wp-config.php) and direct database management are restricted on free plans, this issue usually stems from pasted text encoding mismatches or site language settings rather than underlying database corruption.Step-by-Step Troubleshooting1. Check Site Language Settings

  Ensure your site language is set to Portuguese so WordPress serves content with the correct header tags:

  1. Go to your Dashboard.
  2. Navigate to Settings $rightarrow$ General.
  3. Check the Site Language setting. Ensure it is set to Português or Português do Brasil.
  4. Save changes if updated.

  2. How Content Was Imported/Pasted

  Broken accents, ç, smart quotes, and em-dashes typically occur if text was copied and pasted from external software (like Microsoft Word or an external text editor) that uses non-UTF-8 encoding (e.g., ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252):

  • Plain Text Pasting: Try pasting raw text using Ctrl + Shift + V (Windows) or Cmd + Shift + V (Mac) directly into the Block Editor.
  • Imported Content: If the posts were imported via an XML export file, check whether the original source file was saved using ANSI/ISO encoding instead of standard UTF-8 without BOM.

  3. Re-saving Affected Posts

  Once language settings are verified:

  1. Open an affected post in the editor.
  2. Manually replace a broken character with the correct accent/character.
  3. Click Update.
  4. View the live page to see if the rendering issue persists.

  Note for Staff: If the issue affects existing posts even after re-saving, or if this occurred right after a site migration, a Staff member may need to check whether the database tables for teseeantitese.wordpress.com were created with utf8mb4 collation.

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  justjennifer · Member · Aug 4, 2026 at 8:18 am

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  Hi there, looking at the main page of your site, in the page source I see <meta charset="UTF-8">.

  But I also see

  

  I’ve gone ahead and flagged your forum thread for staff assistance.

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  Accepted answer

  staff-harold · Staff · Aug 4, 2026 at 11:29 am

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  Hi Jose,

  Thanks for your patience while we dug into this.

  Your site was missing a character encoding setting that tells WordPress how to save special characters to the database. It was blank, which caused accented characters, em dashes, and smart quotes to get saved incorrectly. I’ve set this correctly now, so any new posts, pages, categories, or tags you create with special characters going forward will save and display correctly.

  Unfortunately, content that was already affected before this fix can’t be automatically restored. When those characters were originally saved without the correct setting, the actual character data was replaced with placeholder symbols and that original information is no longer recoverable from our side.

  The good news is fixing these going forward is straightforward, since you’ll just need to retype the affected text.

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  sintese · Member · Aug 5, 2026 at 8:17 am

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  Ok. Thank you.