Wordpress foreign language in .php

Question

I'm editing a site for someone, and they are using wordpress, which I really don't like, but hey, I didn't pick it. I need to change some text on their page to Portuguese characters such as Ç or Ã. I've read in a few places, that I need to change from ASCII to UTF-8, but I'm not sure where to do that, or how to do it across the whole site. Am I changing a database to UTF-8, or each individual php file? Hopefully somebody knows, thanks.

Thanks to the comments below, I have most of the site running correctly, but now I can't get the foreign characters in just certain spots, for example, anywhere I'm using code like this inside of a .php file.

$email_list = do_shortcode('[pl_modal title="Join our email list" label="<img class=\'\' title=\'Join our email list\' src=\'/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/email_icon.png\'  /><br /><span>INSCREVA-SE A NOSSA<br />LISTA DE E-MAILS</span>"][gravityform id=1 title=false][/pl_modal]');

The portugese in the above code, if I add non english characters, I get a constantly loading error. More code, that does the same thing.

'<div class="graphicbuttons_cont">' .
                                '<a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr={19}&daddr={20}" target="_blank">
                                    <img title="Get Store Directions" src="/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/getdirection_icon.png"  /><br /><span>LOCALIZACOES <br><br /> </span>
                                </a>' .
                            '</div>' .

the LOCALIZACOES in above text, should have special characters, but it won't hold them. I have changed everything to UTF8 that I can find. But there is nothing inside this specific file that says utf8, should I add something?

Answer 1

Alright, so, if you change everything to utf8, and on wordpress all of your html code is in php files, the way I've used to use special characters is this

thesauruslex.com/typo/eng/enghtml.htm

for example

<span>LOCALIZA&CcedilOES  </span>

will output LOCALIZAÇOES

Thanks to everyone for the help, I guess I could have been clearer on the original question.

Answer 2

Everything in your application needs to be UTF-8.

• Your MySQL string columns should be utf8_unicode_ci.
• You need to ensure that your MySQL connection charset is set to UTF-8. You can do this via the query SET NAMES utf8 (run once after every connection) or you can modify your my.cnf file if you have access to it.
• Your web pages should be served with <meta charset="utf-8">
• You can check and validate what kind of input you're receiving by using the PHP function mb_check_encoding.
• There's also a PHP ini setting called default-charset.

Answer 3

This can be changed two ways depending on your theme file. In the header.php file this should be near the top:

<meta charset="<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>">

You use to be able to change this in the wordpress backend under settings -> reading. I believe now you have to manually change this in the wp-config.php file:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');