Hello !

After a backup recovery of my website, all the emojis used in pages / post / forums were transformed into ????

So, I could correct my posts and pages because the “????” where only a few, but on my forums, they are too many, so I just want to replace the “????” with ” ” so that we don’t get bothered by this issue.

So : Do you know a way to search / replace text in all bbpress topics & replies ?

I have been trying with the plugin Word Replacer, but it doesn’t remove the “????” in database and need to always be running to make the replacement which I want to avoid (I just want to edit all of those ???? and save that change forever).

Do you know other plugin/alternatives I could use to remove those “????” (or make my emojis come back again, which would be awesome 😀 ) !

Thank you for your help !

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years, 1 month ago]

Sounds like a database encoding problem.

My guess is the recovery used the wrong encoding that doesn’t support UTF8MB4.

You’re going to want to not trust this database restore, and do another one with the good content. Otherwise those question marks are going to be permanent!

[@maksanse Participant 5 years, 1 month ago]

Thank you for this quick answer.
I don’t have the chance to be able to get an old & clean database here.

Do you know a way to erase those marks in current database ?

[@casiepa Moderator 5 years, 1 month ago]

@maksanse
As indicated, the best option would indeed be to restart a correct import into a database with the proper characterset. If this is not an option then indeed there are plugins that replace in the DB. Some examples: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/search+replace/
One main remark: do this in a test environment first and always make a backup of everything before launching it

[@maksanse Participant 5 years, 1 month ago]

Thank you Pascal for those advices !