Title: MBString Extensions Creating Errant Question Marks
Last modified: August 30, 2016

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# MBString Extensions Creating Errant Question Marks

 *  [Vimpelli](https://wordpress.org/support/users/vimpelli/)
 * (@vimpelli)
 * [10 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mbstring-extensions-creating-errant-question-marks/)
 * So I have a weird problem with all the WP sites I manage. I have about 75 WordPress
   installs on a VPS that I manage. (Linux, CentOS6, PHP. 5.5, WHM) All of them 
   were chunking along fine until one day I installed a plugin on a dev site on 
   the same server that requires the php extension mbstring to be installed. _(It
   is a legit plugin from a well known developer.)_ So I went in and enabled mbstring,
   rebuilt php and apache, restarted everything and went on my merry way. Shortly
   thereafter we noticed question marks appearing all over our websites. Not like
   this: �, but ACTUAL questions marks like this: ?. I did extensive troubleshooting
   and the issue persists regardless of active theme or plugins. All websites are
   running WP 4.3.1. When you log in to any website and look at any post containing
   the question marks, the ? actually exists in the post as a normal character, 
   exactly as if someone typed it out.
    Also, if you attempt to write a word with
   an accent mark like café, when you save the post, the letter with the accent 
   gets removed completely. This issue goes away when I disable mbstring. Any ideas?
   It seems to be an encoding issue, but it seems like mbstring should work without
   breaking the encoding. Its a hard issue to get help with because searching for
   encoding issues with question marks only gets you issues related to these �, 
   never actual question marks. Its just super weird. Any ideas?

The topic ‘MBString Extensions Creating Errant Question Marks’ is closed to new 
replies.

## Tags

 * [mbstring](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/mbstring/)
 * [php extension](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/php-extension/)
 * [question mark](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/question-mark/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [Vimpelli](https://wordpress.org/support/users/vimpelli/)
 * Last activity: [10 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mbstring-extensions-creating-errant-question-marks/)
 * Status: not resolved

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