Background of the issue:
We have migrated from our staging site to a test site. The migration happened properly, and I didn't see any issues initially. We are using character unicode and utfmb8, and everything looks fine from the database side.
Symptoms:
After migration, most of the text is breaking, showing special characters and question marks like '???????', '| हिनà¥à¤¦à¥€ (61) | ಕನà³à²¨à²¡ (61)'. Clearing the cache from the support tab made it worse, with the issue appearing in more places.
Questions:
How can I fix the issue with special characters and question marks appearing after migration?
Please don't say maybe you have to manually update!!!!
Welcome to the WPML support forum. I will do my best to help you to resolve the issue.
We are reopening this ticket as our latest findings suggest this may be a possible cause of the issue you’re facing (main ticket). Our team is currently checking it and will update you soon.
Here is what we have observed so far:
The site works fine with Hindi and Kannada on WP.com using latin1_swedish_ci as the database collation.
The same languages also work as expected on Cloudways with the same collation.
The issue (special character bug) appears when importing the site locally using an All-in-One Migration backup.
However, the site works fine when copied using Duplicator Pro from Cloudways and installed locally.
The bug reoccurs when importing an All-in-One Migration backup from Cloudways.
The same issue was observed when using a direct database backup from Cloudways.
We appreciate your patience. We will get back to you as soon as we have more updates.
