weird encoding thing/junk characters ?

dex3703

Hello,

I'm enrolled in a PHP/MySQL class and am trying to pin down some weirdness.

I get some junk characters at the start of my pages if I save them as UTF-8. I get this even with the correct DTD and encoding declarations in the php file. If the file is saved as ANSI I don't have the junk characters.

IE doesn't display the junk, but all other browsers do. I haven't quite nailed this down so was hoping somebody could tell me what the deal was.

Thanks,
Derek

tsinka

Hi,

the reason might be that IE is set up to choose the character encoding automatically. Some editors add a signature to UTF-8 files. The standard signature is 0xEF 0xBB 0xEF (ï»¿). Depending on the browser settings that characters will be displayed.

I tested that with IE6. IE6 seems to choose the encoding correctly regardless on the settings. Firefox for example displays the extra character if you choose to display the contents of the file with an encoding of ISO-8859-1 but displays the contents correctly with a character encoding of UTF-8.

You might be able to solve the problem with the following PHP code:

header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");

Thomas

dex3703

Thanks for the reply. Those are the junk characters I'm getting in Opera and the Gecko browsers, so Notepad must be adding in that signature.

I'll try the header() you suggest. Should that be the 1st line in the script? Or should I just use a different editor? 🙂

Thanks, Derek

tsinka

There mustn't be any output prior to the header function call so either put it on top of the script or make sure that there is no output prior to the function call.

What kind of data is stored in the UTF-8 files ?

Thomas

dex3703

They're just html/php files. I was saving them as utf-8 in Notepad to match the encoding given in the DTD and encoding declarations for the xhtml declaration, in hopes of making valid xhtml.

tsinka

Notepad (recent versions) stores these three bytes. Textpad (www.textpad.com) for example doesn't.

Thomas

dex3703

I used textpad a long time ago for a very different job. 🙂

I should go back to editplus or try htmlkit. Some other editors were suggested in class too, but none are installed there.

Thanks for your help!

Derek