Media file descriptions: no support for foreign characters!

[webbeetle]

This is actually NOT a new bug, but an ongoing problem affecting all WP versions:

WP is so US centered that support for foreign characters is lacking or patchy in many cases. A specific problem arises when one spells foreign names correctly with accents or other extended characters. This needs fixing as it also impacts on SEO (lower SERPs with incorrect spelling of places, missing things like the accents).

I submit this for a friend who reported the issue on a closed Facebook group but I have in the past encountered the same issue with our image descriptions; we travel in Latin America and have a travel blog.

Her problem description:

Problem Solved But You'll Never Believe What Caused It: I am in shock that I figured out my problem and thought I would share what happened in case anyone else encounters this. Problem was images were not appearing in my latest post. It was showing up on Chrome desktop but not mobile and not in Safari in desktop/mobile. Others in group were having no problem seeing the images. What caused this? A simple French accent in the image link. I had to take the é accent off the "e". (Instead of "Clos Lucé" I had to write "Clos Luce"). Once I did that all the images appeared. CRAZY! So if any of you want to put an accent on the image description, DON'T.

[juanfra]

Thank you for your first ticket and welcome to trac!

Related: #22363

[SergeyBiryukov]

Duplicate of #22363.

[webbeetle]

This is NOT necessarily the same as the ticket https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22363. The ticket 22363 refers to media file names, I'm talking about media descriptions = part of the text people read on a website'''

Different cup of tea. The description is what's being read by the site visitor. The file name is only reference in storage. How do you think people of other languages will react when they see a familiar name in their language spelt wrongly because WP can't handle international characters in descriptions? (They don't know the background. They only see the mistake.) In the end it doesn't even help the blog in question to look trust worthy...

Regards

Jürgen, who was born in Lüdenscheid

(not Jurgen born in Ludenscheid)

[dd32]

@webbeetle Are you able to duplicate this at all?

There's no known issues with adding non-ascii/english characters to descriptions, and I can't duplicate any myself.
The only known issue is filenames in #22363

There's a good potential that whatever is happening here is caused by a plugin or the theme on the site, and not WordPress itself.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to webbeetle:

WP is so US centered that support for foreign characters is lacking or patchy in many cases.

WordPress is translated to ​more than a hundred locales, and there are no known issues with using UTF-8 characters in attachment descriptions, nor have I seen any other reports of images not being displayed because of that.

Feel free to reopen with steps to reproduce on a clean install if there's still an issue.