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jaybee
Posts: 14320
Joined: 10/7/2003
From: Berkshire, UK
Status: offline
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Funny characters in my page? - 3/12/2007 16:54:54
I'm putting this here as the fix specifically relates to Expression Web, the problem however exists in many other editors and it drives me bonkers.
If you suddenly find you see

usually at the beginning or end of your page
or
you've loaded a php or css file that refuses to work and when you download it and have a look, those 3 nasty little characters have managed to stick themselves on the front or back
It's to do with character encoding and is known as a BOM or Byte Order Mark. Normally this will only appear if you've set your page encoding to utf-8 or greater which is the encoding recommended these days. However, many browsers don't know what to do with it so responsible editors give you the option to encode as utf-8 but turn off the BOM on the front.
The ideal scenario except, all the big guys have forgotten to provide that option. Worse, once you've set one page up in Expressions using utf-8, even if you then go back to Windows encoding, the BOM just sits there and refuses to budge. And worse! Expressions understands the BOM so doesn't display it, you only know it's there when things go horribly wrong on the web.
Coffee Cup Editor, the developers admit they forgot to put the switch off option in but say they'll add it to the next version.
Another team, for a well known editor I shan't name openly, didn't have a clue what I was talking about even when presented with the evidence.
Microsoft were suspiciously quiet on the whole issue and then one of the MVPs found the problem. I could kiss him.
It's in the blank page template!  So if you do File>New and set yourself up a cascading style sheet, or a text file, there's a hidden BOM lurking and just waiting to get you.
Here's how to turn the darn thing off.
http://www.95isalive.com/expression/index.html
_____________________________
If it ain't broke..... fix it until it is.
GAWDS
Now where did I put that Doctype?
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womble
Posts: 5972
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
Status: offline
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RE: Funny characters in my page? - 3/15/2007 12:10:31
quote:
ORIGINAL: Tailslide
B*ll*cks to that.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
_____________________________
~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~
~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~
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The_magus
Posts: 44
Joined: 9/1/2006
Status: offline
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RE: Funny characters in my page? - 4/10/2007 2:43:04
Dear Jaybee:
Just followed your suggestion/instruction about using Unired on a xxx.pl file and noticed when I attemped "save as" the default setting was not UTF-8 (BOM) but UTF-8 but I saved it as that in hopes that it would solve the problem.
It did not!
This error is appearing in the top left corner of my forum page which was created by yaBB and probably is a result of something I messed up but would sure like to get rid of it.
Could it be in one of the "include" pages???
Cheers
Jack
The Magus
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spanner
Posts: 7
Joined: 8/13/2007
Status: offline
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RE: Funny characters in my page? - 8/13/2007 20:37:38
Thanks for that great help!!
I have just started playing with EW as well and found my CSS sheet didn't work, talk about frustrating.
I use topstyle lite - a fantastic free CSS editor, that picked up the little code.
For php I use PHP Designer 2007 which is also free and very good.
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cdwise
Posts: 4
Joined: 6/16/2005
From: Houston, TX
Status: offline
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RE: Funny characters in my page? - 8/30/2007 16:42:37
BOM is the default in Expression Web for UTF-8 and sadly there is no good way to change it in this version. There are things you can do such as usine ISO-8859-1 (my preference) or for php pages that are used as includes you can create an entry for "inc" or some other extension that Expression Web doesn't recognize as a web page and then you will get the option to right click. cjppse encoding and choose not to add the BOM. (Note, you can do this with any css file.)
Many people use inc for their php includes that don't contain connection or password information anyway. Other workarounds include adding a characterset delaration in your included files whether php, asp or otherwise.
There is more information on Characterset and BOM along witha link to a macro to remove the BOM in all your files at http://by-expression.com/tutorials/characterset/ the article includes a screenshot of the encoding box mentioned above.
FWIW, the next version of Expression Web will have native support for PHP and the BOM issue should also go away since PHP doesn't support BOM (which is arguably a problem with PHP since using a BOM is recommended on UTF-8 encoded websites according to the standards body.)
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