I have a WordPress site which randomly shows an error like:
WordPress database error: [Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x92\x97\xF0\x9F...' for column 'option_value' at row 1] UPDATE `wp_options` SET `option_value` = 'a:95:{
This is a placeholder site; the data was exported from the existing live using PhpMyAdmin into a .sql file. I suspect there is some kind of character encoding issues? I have exported by whatever the ‘default may have been as well as UTF8. In the imported database I have tried both character encoding and collation as UTF8 (which it is currently) as well as ‘Latin1 ISO8899 Western Europe’ and ‘utf_general_ci’ as encoding and collation, respectively, but no luck.
I notice that the error happens when I go to the site after an interval.
What can I do?
Thanks!
I’ve recently written a detailed guide on how to switch from MySQL’s
utf8toutf8mb4. If you follow the steps there, everything should work correctly. Here are direct links to each individual step in the process: