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strange character, not traceable

pwired

By pwired,
in General Support

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pwired Hero Member

pwired

Posted
Posted

Hi,

I´m developing local on a wamp but can´t get it to work and I suspect some character

could be the cause. I have a simple template file:

<?php 

/**
 * Page template
 *
 */

include("./head.inc");
include("./main.inc");
include("./foot.inc");

When I want to view a page in firefox it doesn´t show the page how it should look like but

shows all the html code. Also I see these strange characters: (black square with question mark)

This is part of a page showing in firefox:

��<body> <div id="topbar">
</div>
��<div id="footer">

What I also notice is that these strange characters appear just before an include.

Notice that 2 of these characters show up just before main.inc is included

that starts with this code <body> <div id="topbar">

Again 2 of these characters show up just before foot.inc is included

that starts with this code  <div id="footer">

I tried to trace back these characters but failed. I opened main and foot.inc

with notepad which should show these characters but they are not there

in notepad. I always thought that notepad does not suffer from hidden characters.

Do you think that these characters are the cause of my pages not showing up

as they should in firefox but instead show all html ?

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netcarver Hero Member

netcarver

Posted
Posted

Don't use notepad: please!. AFAIR it doesn't handle utf8 and byte order marks correctly. Those characters are probably BOMs from the start of the included files.

Try to use an editor that allows you to set the encoding and line ending of your files. You wan't to set the encoding to "UTF-8 without BOM" and use linux line endings where possible. When I last used Windows (about 10 years ago now) I was using Notepad++ which did the job really well. There are other options on windows - try googling for "programmers editors windows" or something like that.

Once you have a good editor, set it up to save using UTF-8 no BOM and re-save all your files from it. I'm guessing that will solve your issue but cannot guarantee it.

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netcarver Hero Member

netcarver

Posted
Posted

@pwired

If you are learning about programming/developing then do invest time in learning some quality tools as you'll use then a LOT. Getting a good development toolchain and workflow setup will repay you many times the investment you put in up front. One thing you don't wan't to screw around with is a sub-par editor like notepad that doesn't even let you chose the character set to save a file in especially if you are pasting in snippets from all over the internet with diverse character encodings. You will waste your time and ours if you continue down that road. Do yourself a favour and learn something powerful like vim, textmate, sublimetext2 or one of the better IDE editors.

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pwired Hero Member

pwired

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Posted

Ok guys, thanks for the replies. I solved the problem by opening head.inc, main.inc and foot.inc again in notepad

and then saved again but this time with the option encoding Ansi. The strange characters �� disappeared and

the website shows up how it should be in firefox. So both Netcarver and Martijn had it right.

Actually I remember now that I had once the exact same problem back in the days with Evo.

Do yourself a favour and learn something powerful like vim, textmate, sublimetext2 or one of the better IDE editors.

Do these editors you mention show hidden characters (if any) when you paste code in them ?

Notepad didn´t show them while they were there.

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netcarver Hero Member

netcarver

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@pwired,

I'm glad you got your issue sorted out!  :)

It seems I may be wrong about notepad if it does let you choose the encoding - apologies for that - perhaps it has been improved in the last 10 years. Switching to Ansii definitely kills the BOM but it will limit your ability to use UTF-8 characters in your PHP even if you don't use them directly in the HTML. So I'd still recommend using a fully fledged programming editor over notepad.

Personally, I use vim as my editor and you can set it up to show "whitespace" characters. It does have a long and steep learning curve though so you might be better served by notepad++ or Sublimetext2. I've not had any trouble with BOMs since I stopped using Windows and switched to Linux & vim as my editor.

If your webserver and HTML headers are serving your pages as UTF-8 then sending only Ascii chars will be fine (they are a subset of UTF-8) but pretty limiting, especially if you ever need to use a language other than English at any point. UTF-8 without BOM does seem the way to go for webpages (at least at the moment.)

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Joss Hero Member

Joss

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Yes, MS Notepad changed many years ago now.

However, although I use Sublime mostly now, I still find myself falling back to TextPad and Notepad++ regularly. Very fond of TextPad, to be honest, though it has never been very popular, probably because it is not strictly free, though you can evaluate it forever. I always liked its robust search within files

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