[RESOLVED] Include throws off formatting

[NobodyGood]

I have a parent file playground.php with the following...

<p>Item 1</p>
<p>Item 2</p>
<p>Item 3</p>

<br />

<p>Item 1</p>
<?php include "item2.php"; ?>
<p>Item 3</p>

The contents of item2.php is simply...

<p>Item 2</p>

I expected the output of the two sets of paragraphs to look the same, but instead I get added space...

Item 1

Item 2

Item 3

Item 1
&#65279;

Item 2

Item 3

[There is a phantom paragraph of extra space display in Firefox, Chrome, and IE between Item 1 and Item 2.]

Odd. So I tried using the php echo command in the item2.php file like this...

<?php echo("<p>Item 2</p>"); ?>

Same result.

Using Firefox I inspected the source and found that the representation for each paragraph set looked the same. This was what I'd expected. However, using Firebug's HTML window it appears there is an added element of some kind...

<p>Item·1</p>
¶··
<p>Item·2</p>
¶··
<p>Item·3</p>
¶¶··
<br>
¶¶··
<p>Item·1</p>
¶··&#65279;
<p>Item·2</p>
··
<p>Item·3</p>
¶¶··¶*¶

I'm afraid I was not able to decipher what that new element &#65279; is supposed to represent. I was under the impression that when php did its preprocessing thing, the browser should have received, in this example, two sets of paragraphs that were indistinguishable.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

I'm using Dreamhost shared hosting. php version 5.3.5.

Ran phpinfo() and was a bit overwhelmed by all the information that it spit out. Anything I should look for there?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Weedpacket]

Possibly your include file starts with a byte-order mark (BOM) that your text editor decided to add when you saved it. How you tell if it did, and how you tell it not to, depends on the editor you're using.

[NobodyGood]

Dude, you nailed it.

I've switched between several editors but pulled the sample files into Notepad++ and changed the encoding for UTF-8 without BOM, re-saved, and it worked.

Seems like having invisible characters out there to mess things up was a poorly thought out idea. I would have imagined there would be a way to have the web server use the BOM to understand the encoding of the page, but then ignore it when it came to rendering.

No server setting or switch to flip to fix this sort of thing?

[bradgrafelman]

It's a PHP option: zend.multibyte (and detect_unicode).

There's also a compile-time option '--enable-zend-multibyte' available since PHP 5.0.0b2, implemented in response to Request #22108.

[NobodyGood]

Excellent. Thanks to you both.