Strange characters in PHP

Question

This is driving me crazy.

I have this one php file on a test server at work which does not work.. I kept deleting stuff from it till it became

<?
print 'Hello';
?>

it outputs

Hello

if I create a new file and copy / paste the same script to it it works! Why does this one file give me the strange characters all the time?

Answer 1

That's the BOM (Byte Order Mark) you are seeing.

In your editor, there should be a way to force saving without BOM which will remove the problem.

Answer 2

Is the document saved in an encoding such as UTF-8/16? What encoding does the html-page specify?

Answer 3

Wow that was fast guys !

Thanks I will check it out.

Answer 4

We had the same thing happen once upon a time it drove the dev crazy for a while too :-)

Someone had opened the file and accidentally saved it with BOM and from there on the editor would preserve the BOM while saving the file.

In your editor, there should be a way to force saving without BOM which will remove the problem.

Answer 5

Found it, file -> encoding -> UTF8 with BOM , changed to to UTF :-)

I should ahve asked before wasing time trying to figure it out :-)

Answer 6

Just in case, here is a list of bytes for BOM

Encoding    Representation (hexadecimal)
UTF-8   EF BB BF
UTF-16 (BE) FE FF
UTF-16 (LE) FF FE
UTF-32 (BE) 00 00 FE FF
UTF-32 (LE) FF FE 00 00
UTF-7   2B 2F 76, and one of the following bytes: [ 38 | 39 | 2B | 2F ]†
UTF-1   F7 64 4C
UTF-EBCDIC  DD 73 66 73
SCSU    0E FE FF
BOCU-1  FB EE 28 optionally followed by FF†