[GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I have been running a WordPress blog hosted on a Linux-based shared host since
| WordPress became a thing. It has worked quite well from about 2004 up until a
| few weeks ago.

Do you have shell access?  I think you imply "yes".

| Sadly, *something* recently decided my database encoding was wrong. And that
| something decided to "fix" it. It certainly "fixed it", but not in any way I
| could want. It also did the same for Catherine's blog.

Does "fix it" mean "changed the raw data" or mangle the data somewhere 
downstream of the disk files?

| I know I didn't change any part of the config chain. As far as I can see:
| 
| * the MySQL database still thinks the text is encoded in UTF-8;
| 
| * Wordpress thinks the data is in UTF-8;
| 
| * the web server is serving UTF-8.

And says so: <meta charset>"UTF-8" />

| I'm pretty much resigned to going through 16+ years of posts fixing this, but
| can mangled UTF-8 be recovered without rekeying?

Back-ups?