After my latest WordPress update (which as a manual one, with a whole lot of mysql issues!) I finally got my blog up and running again, only to find all my apostrophes appearing as “â€TM” –stupid junk characters. After going into panic mode for about two minutes, I figured out the solution, at least in my case.
It was quite simple, jump in my wp-config, and comment out two lines.
# define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);# define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
And just like that, all was normal again. Hope this helps someone.

Ya know, I just moved my database and had this same problem. Was extremely frustrating. Thanks for this – did exactly what was needed!
Thanks for this post. I only wish that I’d stumbled on to it when I faced this problem a few months ago. Not finding any ready-made solution at the time, I began the long and tedious process of making this correction manually. Since I still had a few posts uncorrected, I tried out your solution today. It works – but, I’d to use /* to begin the comment and */ to end it, instead of the # character you’ve suggested.
However, the catch is, after incorporating your suggested changes, posts that I’d manually corrected in the meanwhile started displaying a square-like junk character. Had I not bothered with the manual correction, I’m sure your solution would’ve worked like a dream!
For the uninitiated – in whose ranks I myself belonged until I cracked it today – the wp-config.php file you’ve referred to can be found on the root of your blog, which in my case was http://www.sketharaman.com/blog.
What the hell does “jump” in mean and wp-config and “comment out” mean. Thanks for confusing me even more.
And Tadd, how doid you (I suppose inadvertently) move your data base?
Jump in means get into (what else?) – Commenting out is as simple as adding # sign before the lines (as I displayed it,) or you can wrap it in /* these two awesome things */ to comment them out.
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you need to run a query like this one on your database
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace( post_content, ‘’’, “‘” )
be warned that if you have one badly encoded character then you will have loads for ” £ ‘ – _ etc and they will all have to be fixed very carefully.
Thanks for this post. I only wish that I’d stumbled on to it when I faced this problem a few months ago. Not finding any ready-made solution at the time, I began the long and tedious process of making this correction manually. Since I still had a few posts uncorrected, I tried out your solution today. It works – but, I’d to use /* to begin the comment and */ to end it, instead of the # character you’ve suggested.
+1