A while back someone contacted me about their WordPress blog borking out on some of their posts. After a bit of poking about it became apparent that this was because WordPress doesn’t allow high Unicode characters in the URL.

Every time I typed a Unicode character, (after posting) it would display as a ‘?’. Basically, the problem is that WordPress is not saving Unicode characters. This problem will not be there for WordPress blogs hosted on wordpress.com server.

Of course, this can be easily fixed in two steps. All you’ll need is FTP access to your server and a fair comprehension of how to type. So, let’s get started!

Here are the instructions to allow your WordPress blog to have high Unicode like Hebrew in the URL:

  1. Open up ‘wp-config.php’ from the root directory of your WordPress installation.
  2. Add ‘//’ at the very beginning of these two lines:


define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', ''

So that section should now look like this:


//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

You’re already finished. How easy was that?