Movable Type Knowledge Base: Accented Characters Display Incorrectly

Question

Accented characters display incorrectly in my pages.

Answer

After Importing

If you are importing a weblog from an earlier version of Movable Type (before 3.0), your data is most likely encoded using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, but Movable Type 3.x is set by default to use the UTF-8 encoding.

To change the character encoding used by Movable Type, open mt-config.cgi¹ in a plain text editor and find the line that reads:

PublishCharset utf-8

Change utf-8 to the same encoding that was used in the PublishCharset option in your old installation's configuration file. Save the file and upload it back to your server in ASCII mode.

Other

If an accented character displays as something like Ã© or Ã, Movable Type is publishing a UTF-8 database with ISO-8859-1 pages. The PublishCharset should be set to utf-8.

If an accented character displays as a diamond question mark, Movable Type is publishing a ISO-8859-1 database with UTF-8 pages. The PublishCharset should be set to iso-8859-1.

¹ In versions prior to 3.2, the configuration file is named mt.cfg.

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