Special characters when importing from mailchimp

First of all - Great plugin - exactly what I was looking for - and great interface - props to the designer of that.

I have created a newletter in danish containing the letters Æ - Ø & Å and it shows up in mailchimp fine, but when i use the import function to create a post in wordpress, these characters are muddled - a characterset issue i guess....

Hello madsfind,

I'm looking into it. Can you please check what character set your site is set to. Go in your WPadmin to Settings - Reading. What does it say in the field "Encoding for pages and feeds"? If something different than UTF-8 is set then please try to enter "UTF-8" (without quotes) and see if it makes a difference.
You could also try if one of the ISO 8859 sets works: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_set#Common_character_encodings

Kind regards,
Pete

Edit: I just sent a campaign including danish characters and it comes out fine after importing as a wordpress blog post. The WP site is set to UTF-8 and my browser is set to "Auto-Detect", which then resolves to UTF-8 (View - Character Encoding). If the browser is set to ISO or something else it doesn't work.

Hi Pete - Thanks for the reply

Wordpress is set to UTF-8

What i can see is that when i create the content in mailchimp it URL encodes the special characters (å for å, ø for ø etc.) - which makes sure that it shows up right no matter what characterset you use - I'm not confident that we can make sure that every recipient of the newsletter and every visitor to our website has the right characterset setting in their browser and e-mail client....
It seems to me that if you URL encoded special characters before sending to and retrieving from mailchimp, that would be the right way to do it. And then not only would you support us poor scandinavians but also alot of special typograhic characters as well.

Kind regards
- Mads

Oh and I just realised that it's the same problem when i create the newsletter with your plugin, it shows up fine in mailchimp but shows up with special characters marbled in the e-mail newsletter.

æ =C3=A6 | ø =C3=B8 | å =C3=A5= | - =C2=A0- | Æ =C3=86 | Ø =C3=98 | Å =C3=85

- M

When importing the problem lies in the WYSIWYG editor. Even if we would encode the characters to htmlspecialchars (that's what you mean, not URL encoding) as soon as the post is opened in the visual layout of the editor the characters are converted to plain text even if they were html encoded before rendering any previous conversion useless. Besides that if your site's character is set to UTF-8 the user's browser will automatically switch to UTF-8. If the user then manually changes the character set there is nothing we can do about it. Some characters are just not available in certain charsets.

When I create a campaign in ChimpExpress containing danish characters as plain text and then open the campaign in MailChimp, those characters are converted automatically to htmlspecialchars. Also if I send the campaign off the characters are displayed properly in both, the HTML and text version. According to this post MailChimp fully supports UTF-8 characters: kb.mailchimp.com/article/does-mailchimp-...national-characters/ I'm not quite sure why this doesn't work in your case. I guess it has to do with your brwoser/email client not being set to detect the charset automatically.

Thanks for that reply and the correction of terms. Yes htmlspecialchars was what I ment.

It is not a characterset issue on my side - everything, including mysql, wordpress, browser & email clients (checked on several different, including gmail) are set to UTF-8.
I have tried another plugin that does some of the same (without the elegance of yours) - ChimpBlast - not what I need at all, but it manages to get Title and content of the post from my wordpress to mailchimp without any alternation of the letters. So again - I think it is an issue/bug of your plugin, and i'm terribly frustrated by it, since yours is, by far, the best mailchimp plugin for wordpress i´ve seen.

This is what I get when i try to import a newsletter from mailchimp

- Mads

- Mads