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 - BOM characters


dina

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I went to the old forum to read up on BOM, I followed the link and still don't understand how to resolve it. Can anybody please give me a quick selotion for BOM characters at the beginning of my web page please. It seems to me it is blocking any thing after it cause I'm sitting with a blank page in front of me!:o

 

I have read that people experience this problem if working with php, well I'm working with php if that can help.

 

thank you

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originally I am using notelpad, but I got DWmx demo from a friend so that I can get the feel of it, and still it gave me BOM when I opened it in DW.

 

But I must add, in the mean while while waiting for a reply I went and opened my php & css in notepad and then resave them both under ANSI insted of UTF-8 and the BOM disappear. I then went back and change it back, and as sure as Hell, there they are again.

 

I have manage to get my content on css back on my page, cause I was on the wrong level in my link.

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"The first step you will have to take is to give up Notepad. Notepad has a bug (OK, not strictly a bug, but a very undesireable feature). When saving as Unicode (utf-8), it adds a byte-order mark, which is a zero-width space used to indicate the file contents and whether UTF-16 is "little-endian" or "big-endian" (waaay off-topic for this post!). A BOM is not required in utf-8 and should never be used on the web. Notepad will break your utf-8 pages, sometimes to the extent that you will need a hex editor to fix them.

 

If you use a web-friendly text editor then just select utf-8 and save away. You may need to convert older files, and it is best to be consistent and save as utf-8 everywhere. Don't forget that one big advantage of utf-8 is that it is ASCII-compatible, so the transition is easy. "

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/11759.htm

 

That seems to indicate that it is an issue with the way that Notepad saves files... though I can save as UTF-8 in Notepad and it seems to work fine for me, no BOM displays. Odd. The post is old though, so maybe it's no longer applicable.

 

I don't fully understand the difference between ANSI and UTF-8 myself... Basically, it seems like they are different character sets that allow you to save a range of characters, and UTF-8 is preferred, since it can store more characters. Someone may have to help me with me explanation here -- I checked Wikipedia but most of it is very technical and went over my head.

 

The point is, it sounds like UTF-8 is the way to go, maybe just don't use notepad to save the files. I wouldn't usually suggest using Notepad anyway, at least go with a text editor that has tabs and code highlighting and such.

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  • 5 months later...

Notepad++ is the answer to all your BOM pains :)

 

For some reason, with Dreamweaver (and maybe other editors), the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is introduced when you have not asked it to be... and only on some pages. It's a bug. Problem is, the bug makes your page invalid to W3C standards. The DW validation tool won't pick this up

 

Download and install the free Notepad++.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

 

Whenever the W3C validator throws up the BOM error, just open up the file in Notepad++, click on the 'Format' option, tick 'encode in UTF-8 without BOM' and then save your file. The BOM is taken out and your page is valid again.

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  • 10 months later...
Guest ashim

That seems to indicate that it is an issue with the way that Notepad saves files... though I can save as UTF-8 in Notepad and it seems to work fine for me, no BOM displays. Odd. The post is old though, so maybe it's no longer applicable.

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