Weird Character Issue

Carl Milsted, Jr on Feb 3 19:24:09

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If you have used character entities, such as mdash for a long dash (—), or pasted in emogis, you might notice that some of your old posts or comments have been corrupted.

This was caused by upgrading the MySQL device driver. The database was thinking that the bytes it was getting was just the Latin-1 character set, while I was trying to send UTF-8. With the old driver, no conversions happened and the arrangement just worked.

By "fixing" things, some of the information in the database got reinterpreted.

A while back I took down the site for a day and set the database fields to the proper 4 byte UTF interpretation for strings. But in the process, some conversions occurred.

You can fix old posts by editing them, erasing the junk characters, and redoing the HTML entities/emojis.

New posts should just work. If not, please complain in the comments.

Sorry about the inconvenience.