Hi people! I have encountered a strange issue with the Wordpress search widget. I have noticed that the first - but only the first - search you do with it using international characters - German umlauts in my case - fails because of an encoding problem.

For example, if you search for "Größe" with an ö in it, no search results are found because the search resolves in the address bar of the browser to:

/?s=GröÃ%C2%9Fe&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

If you then enter it again it resolves to

/?s=Größe&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

and the search works.

If you revisit later - presumably when your browser cache is cleared - the problem occurs again. Any ideas what this could be? It does not occur if I switch to the Wordpress twenty fourteen theme.

what happens if you temporally disable ALL plugins?

Well.. what happens after I finally do my homework :-) You are right of course. It turns out that the culprit is the LaterPay Plugin: https://srd.wordpress.org/plugins/laterpay/
With it the first attempt goes wrong, the second one works. I have notified the programmer, I guess it is something on his end to fix.
Happens with Atahualpa and WP standard themes.