Accents and symbols look wrong
What to do when letters such as é, ü or ß turn into é or question marks, in the review or on your site, and how to tell a problem in the file from one on your site.
- 2 min read
- Updated October 13, 2026
Letters outside plain English (é, ü, ß, ñ, “ ”, —) depend on the encoding of the file. Content Uploader reads UTF-8 and refuses a CSV that is not, so the usual cause is caught before anything is published. What is left needs a little detective work.
Symptoms#
- The page says Cells must contain valid UTF-8 text of at most 32 KB. and the file could not be processed.
- Accents show as
é,ü,’or�in the review. - The review is right, but the post on your site shows question marks or boxes.
- Emoji are missing on the site.
Likely causes#
Confirmed (reproduced in our tests):
- A CSV saved as ANSI / Windows-1252 / Latin-1 with an accent in it is refused with the message above. Plain English text in the same encoding is accepted, because it looks the same in every encoding.
- UTF-16 without a byte order mark is refused with the same message. UTF-16 with one (Excel's Unicode Text) is converted and read.
Possible (depends on where the text came from):
- The text was garbled before it reached the spreadsheet: copied from a page that was displayed with the wrong encoding, or converted twice.
éiséthat was read as Latin-1 and saved as UTF-8: it is valid UTF-8, so Content Uploader accepts it and publishes it as it is. - Your site's database or theme does not store or display some characters (older databases that store only three-byte characters lose emoji).
Step-by-step solution#
- Look at the review. Open an item (Show the row's values for a row with an error). The text there is exactly what will be published.
- Wrong in the review: the problem is in the file. Go to step 2.
- Right in the review, wrong on the site: the problem is on your site. Go to step 5.
- Open the file in Excel or LibreOffice. If it already looks wrong there, fix the source text, not the upload.
- Save the CSV as UTF-8 (Excel: CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited); Google Sheets: Download → CSV; LibreOffice: Unicode (UTF-8) in the filter options), or upload an Excel workbook, which has no such problem (character encoding).
- Upload the file again. The corrected items are listed as updated; publishing replaces the garbled text.
- If only the site shows it wrongly, check the site: the database's character set (utf8mb4 for emoji), the theme's fonts, and the page's declared encoding. A post that is correct in the editor but wrong on the page points at the theme.
How to verify#
- The review shows the accents correctly for the items that were wrong.
- On your site, the post's editor and the public page both show them correctly.
If it persists#
Send support the row's values copied from the review and a screenshot of the page on your site. Support can tell which side the difference is on.
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