How to deal with obj wordpress post problems
Today I’m going to show you some tips and give you a tool on how to remove obj in a box in wordpress. This obj icon thing is super annoying and can appear when you’ve copied text from somewhere else and pasted it into your new wordpress post, or into facebook or somewhere like that.
What does obj in a box in wordpress even look like?
When you see it, it looks very confusing, here is an example of one ->  <-. Yea, weird huh? It is really just a character that is encoded in a way that wordpress doesn't really understand how to display. So when you paste stuff into your post, it's invisible in the edit box, but when you publish it can appear all over the place.
Here is a tool to remove obj in a box in wordpress
First things first, if you just want the obj wordpress problem solved now, paste your text into this box and press “Clean Text”. Now press Copy Text to copy it again.
Manual removal of obj in a box in wordpress
It’s not super hard to remove it yourself. You don’t have to always come back to this page to do it, although the tool we made for you does make it pretty easy. But I’m going to actually show you the way to do it on your own computer. But first some background.
Background on these weird wordpress obj surrounded by box things
If you’ve done much copying of data and pasting things you’ve probably seen a funny little icon appear in your text that looks like obj in a box, right there in your wordpress post. These are actually characters that the wordpress software and your browser don’t really know how to display and are likely not very important to your text.
Examples of obj and what it means
Here are some different “hidden” characters and what they mean (from google).
U+00DF ß or ß Latin small letter Sharp S
U+00FE þ or þ Latin small letter Thorn
U+0394 Δ or Δ Greek capital letter Delta
U+017D Ž or Ž Latin capital letter Z with háček
Ok, now let’s get to how we can remove them using a text editor on our computer.
Remove with a text editor
Removing with a text editor can be quite simple and easier than finding this web page again.
Notepad, TextEdit or Gedit
Have you ever used notepad? It’s probably the most basic editor in the world and is installed by default with windows. If you are on a mac, then you probably would want to use TextEdit. If you are on linux, then you can use kedit or gedit or vi.
Actually remove them
Once you’ve fired up your editor. Copy your text from your wordpress post edit box and paste it into your text editor. You should notice that the obj in a box is no longer there. Now, highlight everything and copy it back out of your editor and paste it right over the top of the original text in wordpress. Yea, this seems weird. But it essentially strips the text for you and you shouldn’t lose any of your actual content.And that’s the second way of how to remove obj in a box in wordpress!
What are the obj in a box characters anyway?
Now that you’ve got 2 solid solutions for cleaning up bad text. Let’s talk about what these objs are anyway. They are not icons. They are not something that the author wanted you to see. These are characters that probably something that were on a different web page or something and weren’t visible.
What is an obj with a box around it?
Regular characters, well the ones that most people in the United States are used to are called the ascii characters. Check out this post for our explanation of the ascii table. There are a lot of other characters that don’t fit into this paradigm however. There is a much larger set of characters that go beyond those just imagined in the old days called the ascii set. Ascii is a subset of this larger set and non ascii characters don’t often display very well.
Example of some weird characters that you might encounter
Here is a whole bunch of these symbols () ()!
Hello world!
Here is a whole bunch of these symbols () ()!
Hello world2!
Note that on some computers / browsers the above text will be hidden and on others you’ll see the following:
