WordPress ??? Display - Show Chinese Characters

I am having this WordPress character display for quite some time and not knowing how to resolve it until today. Thanks to Steven Wong on his post about fixing characters on WordPress.

Before that, my blog was running fine with capabilities to display non-English characters, such as Chinese characters properly with no issue. During that time, the site is running on WordPress legacy version; that is, version 2.0.11. However, after upgrading a later version of WordPress, i.e. WordPress 2.3.x, those non-English characters have failed to display, and replaced by question marks (?). For example, "" would show up as "???"

(continue reading to find how to resolve this issue...)

Without realising that by upgrading the WordPress to a later version, actually replaced specific commands in the script. This is particular to the following lines in "wp-config.php" file.

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8?);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Remove the lines by adding double slashes to them, i.e.

// define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8?);
// define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

In doing so, the original post with error, as shown in this image, will show up like below:

According to WordPress Codex, it is strong advised that if both DB_COLLATE and DB_CHARSET do not exist in the original "wp-config" file when WordPress was first installed, these two definitions should not be added to the file after upgrading, unless user is fully aware and understand the underlying engine of Converting Database Character Sets for WordPress. Adding them to existing blog can cause problems, such as the one mentioned in this post. This pertains to those who are performing upgrades.

However, according to Steven, it was mentioned that by removing the two definitions, it may cause RSS to display erroneously. This is probably the only downside of this. Once again, this issue has not yet arised for me. So, it may still work for you.