Moodle - Strange characters have appeared

[Hightower]

Our music teacher has just popped in and told me the 'Â' character has appeared in strange places on various courses.

I'm not sure what has caused this but is it possible to run an SQL on the database that replaces al  characters with nothing thus removing them all?

Ta

[secretlife]

Hi there. I don't know anything about sql to help get rid of it (not much help sorry!) but it might be worth investigating the cause - there are several occasions where this might occur -pasting word processed characters that then don't display properly in certain browsers (like FF for example) or issues with utf8/latin database inconsistency. It might be worth doing a search on mooodle.org to see if anything matches your ocurrences.

[mikeglover]

We had something similar quite a while back with our moodle server when an upgrade was done.
I think it was something to do with utf8. I can't exactly remember what was wrong because I've slept since then.
What version of Moodle are you running? If you started off with an old version of moodle without utf8 support you might need to upgrade the database with utf8.
Another thing, moodle has serveral language packs you may need to set the default to Eng (utf8).

[Hightower]

We had something similar quite a while back with our moodle server when an upgrade was done.
I think it was something to do with utf8. I can't exactly remember what was wrong because I've slept since then.
What version of Moodle are you running? If you started off with an old version of moodle without utf8 support you might need to upgrade the database with utf8.
Another thing, moodle has serveral language packs you may need to set the default to Eng (utf8).

Well the thing is these weird characters have only just come about. We're 1.9.7+ but I haven't made any updates/upgrades in weeks/months. But they only came about last week.

[mikeglover]

Well the thing is these weird characters have only just come about. We're 1.9.7+ but I haven't made any updates/upgrades in weeks/months. But they only came about last week.

mmm... strange. possibly your site has been hijacked. I'd keep an eye out when navigating round the site if you see any strange links in the status bar when pages are loading etc.

[Hightower]

mmm... strange. possibly your site has been hijacked. I'd keep an eye out when navigating round the site if you see any strange links in the status bar when pages are loading etc.

No, I don't think it's been hijacked. Would more than likely see bigger changes than this is it was successfully hijacked.