AIIMS Encoding Repair

One-click repair of garbled ("mojibake") characters in a WordPress / WooCommerce database — the â€", ’, é-style corruption left behind when a site is imported or migrated with the wrong character set.

Preview every change with Dry Run, then Apply. It only rewrites cells that actually contain the tell-tale bytes, and it is serialization-safe, so ACF fields, theme options and page-builder data stay valid.

Stores no settings, adds no front-end hooks, makes no external calls during a repair. Deactivating or deleting the plugin leaves no trace — the corrected text simply stays corrected.

What it fixes

Smart quotes and dashes (' ' " " – —), ellipsis …, bullet •, trademark ™, euro €, copyright ©, registered ®, degree °, non-breaking spaces, and accented Latin letters (é è ê ë à â ä ç ñ ö ô ü û á í ó ú).

It scans the core content tables — posts (title, content, excerpt), postmeta, options, comments, terms, term taxonomy and term meta — which covers WooCommerce product titles and descriptions, ACF fields and most page-builder content.

Usage

Tools → AIIMS Encoding Repair → Dry run (preview) to see what would change, then Apply fix. A built-in self-test on the page shows before/after samples so you can confirm the fixer works before touching your data.

Back up the database before applying. Always run Dry Run first.

WP-CLI is also supported:

wp aiims-encoding dry    # preview, writes nothing
wp aiims-encoding fix    # apply

How it works (safety)

• Admin-only — every action requires manage_options and a valid nonce.
• Targeted — only rows containing the corruption bytes (Ã / Â / â) are read; clean text is never touched.
• Serialization-safe — serialized values are unserialized, repaired, then re-serialized so structured data (ACF, options, builders) stays valid.
• Single-pass — a longest-match strtr() pass, so replacements never cascade.
• Stateless — no options stored, no cron, no front-end hooks. Removing the plugin removes it completely.

Fix the root cause too

This plugin repairs existing garble; to stop it recurring on a server, fix the import charset: set define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4'); and define('DB_COLLATE', ''); in wp-config.php, ensure the database and tables are utf8mb4 (not latin1), and always migrate with UTF-8 on both ends (mysqldump --default-character-set=utf8mb4 …, and in phpMyAdmin set the import "Character set of the file" to utf8mb4).

Requirements

• WordPress 5.0+
• PHP 7.0+

Installation

Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin → choose aiims-encoding-repair.zip → Activate.

Auto-updates

Auto-updates are built in — no external library or extra plugin required. The plugin checks this repository's latest GitHub Release (cached for 6 hours) and, when a higher version is published, shows the update in Dashboard → Updates. One click installs it.

To ship an update: bump the Version: header, publish a new GitHub Release with a higher tag, and attach the built plugin zip as a release asset.

Repository: https://github.com/AiimsRobin/aiims-encoding-repair

Changelog

• 1.0.1 — Renamed to AIIMS Encoding Repair; built-in GitHub self-updater (no external library required).
• 1.0.0 — Initial release (as Mojibake Repair).

License

GPL-2.0-or-later.