Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin : Get Rid Off Odd Charecters in WordPress

Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin helps you to clean up odd characters in WordPress, which often gets added after moving WordPress or sudden major MySQL upgrade. There was a WordPress Plugin to remove these odd characters, “Was” because it by default do not work for WordPress 3.3 any more. It was named “UTF8 Sanitize”. Sp0nky did a good job by modifying the script. We have compiled it to a WordPress Plugin named Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin.

Who will use Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin

The ideal users are quite obviously those are who are having the ASCI Art like?Clean Up Weird Characters usually after –

• You started your WordPress blog on a crap web host, who never updated MySQL or PHPMyAdmin, your blog begin to grow and you shifted to a updated good server. This sudden change of ‘weather’ makes your WordPress sick and produces those ASCI Art on your beautiful blog – you can search the whole internet, I am quite sure that the story behind this is almost the same in 80% cases, if not less.
• Web host suddenly got excited to update MySQL, without any notice.
• Your declared character by server is not UTF8 and your header is saying its UTF8. Not UTF8 means is of ISO 8859-1. The vice versa can happen too. The server header will given importance by the browser over the HTML simply because it is setup in that way.
• You are using a badly coded theme that is messing up the UTF8 declaration.
• You have edited database table using a text editor and unknowingly added some chars.

Steps before using?Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin

• Open any post in your browser and check its HTML source code, it should be like this :

• ?If the header is OK, there is no probably no problem, otherwise fix it first.
• Go to W3C or any online tool to check the header response. In this way, your servers header can be checked.
• This is not only a ugly problem, it sucks double bandwidth. Read this excellent post on this thing. If you are having problem only with extra ? , then?adding this before a DB insert will fix it –

mysql_query(“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”);

• You can use PHPMyAdmin to fix these too – read it here.
• It is better to have a full MySQL backup before using the plugin.

How to install?Clean Up Weird Characters WordPress Plugin

1. Download the Clean Up Weird Characters plugin?by clicking here, unzip upload it via FTP to : ./wp-content/plugins/ or directly upload via WordPress Plugin upload page.
2. Activate the?Clean Up Weird Characters plugin via Admin panel.
3. Go to Settings >?Clean Up Weird Characters
4. Check the first check box and run it.
5. Usually all problems will be solved except extra ?.
6. Thats it.

Resources we have used for this?Clean Up Weird Characters plugin

1. The first two are mentioned above.
2. UTF8 Sanitize is the base of this?Clean Up Weird Characters plugin.
3. phpriot.com for the update, thanks to Sabri Razin.
4. Code Value Table is here.

Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin Version History

• February 2nd, 2012 – Clean Up Weird Characters Version 1.0 released.

Probable problems with Clean Up Weird Characters Plugin :

Only one problem you might face – that is Clean Up Weird Characters plugin’s settings page gets reloaded and check box get unchecked. Try to deactivate any cache plugin / conflicting plugin. We will try to add more features, especially to clean up? extra ?.