Title: Special Character Encoding Problem Suddenly
Last modified: September 1, 2016

---

# Special Character Encoding Problem Suddenly

 *  [praisevideo](https://wordpress.org/support/users/praisevideo/)
 * (@praisevideo)
 * [9 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/special-character-encoding-problem-suddenly/)
 * Three of the WP sites that I manage suddenly began to remove special characters
   like smart quotes, em dashes, etc. automatically from posts on publish or update
   about two or three weeks ago. All of these sites have run for several years without
   this problem and there have been no migrations or database changes.
 * The databases and wpconfig files both show UTF8 but the sites refuse to allow
   special characters.
 * [http://hergreenroom.com](http://hergreenroom.com)
    [http://altongarrison.com](http://altongarrison.com)
   [http://worldagfellowship.org](http://worldagfellowship.org)

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  [MyThemeShop](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mythemeshop/)
 * (@mythemeshop)
 * [9 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/special-character-encoding-problem-suddenly/#post-7644251)
 * Hi,
    Most issues are caused by the theme or a plugin. First of all, please try:–
   deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, 
   re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). –
   switching to the default theme like Twenty Fifteen to rule out any theme-specific
   problems.
 * Let us know if the issue persists even with a default theme and all the plugins
   disabled.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Special Character Encoding Problem Suddenly’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [encoding](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/encoding/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [MyThemeShop](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mythemeshop/)
 * Last activity: [9 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/special-character-encoding-problem-suddenly/#post-7644251)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics