Forum
Strange characters and missing posts
Something weird's afoot.
On at least four of my Perch websites (three of which I haven't touched since this happened) odd characters have started appearing and some blog posts have vanished (they're in the tables but not appearing in Perch).
The weird characters are typically diamonds with question marks in where they should be pound signs or quotes, accented 'e's, hyphens and the like.
The missing posts are very odd. I can sort of fix them by copying the post from the website (where it still works, apart from the odd characters) or from the table where all seems fine.
The oddest thing is that it seems to have happened to at least four websites and I'm still exploring.
Is there anything obvious to explain this?
Cheers - Mark
It also seems to be happening in editable regions but in these cases all i need to do is to go into Perch and press save and it fixes itself.
Sounds like something somewhere is not UTF8. Perhaps something has changed on the server?
There is an explanation of UTF8 here: https://www.toptal.com/php/a-utf-8-primer-for-php-and-mysql#.
If you know you haven't changed anything then perhaps talk to your host.
Thanks, I've put a support ticket in to them, likely hear back on Monday.
What I don't understand is why some of the posts' descriptions should have vanished in Perch (as an editor or admin). They're still there in the MySQL tables and still appear on the websites affected. Would/could the UTF-8 issue cause this do you think?
Did you update these sites from an older version?
Not during the time the issue occurred. They might have previously been updated though. In the space of a couple of day I noticed four (now five) sites were impacted in this way.
It might be worth looking over the "note about database connections" in some of the older updates:
https://grabaperch.com/update/v2-2-8
Completely perplexed here. The issue has gone away as mysteriously as it appeared.
The server people swear they haven't done anything.
Still can't see how it was anything to do with Perch per se, unless there was something weird in my coding that was 'revealed' by a temporary change/issue with the server.
Anyway, all seems fine now.
Thanks for all the help and suggestions.