How do I remove from the beginning of a file

Question

I have a CSS file that looks fine when I open it using gedit  but when it s read by PHP  to merge all the CSS files into one   this CSS has the following characters prepended to it          PHP removes all whitespace  so a random        in the middle of the code messes up the entire thing  As I mentioned  I can t actually see these characters when I open the file in gedit  so I can t remove them very easily   I googled the problem  and there is clearly something wrong with the file encoding  which makes sense being as I ve been shifting the files around to different Linux Windows servers via ftp and rsync  with a range of text editors  I don t really know much about character encoding though  so help would be appreciated   If it helps  the file is being saved in UTF-8 format  and gedit won t let me save it in ISO-8859-15 format  the document contains one or more characters that cannot be encoded using the specified character encoding   I tried saving it with Windows and Linux line endings  but neither helped

User · Answer

grep  -rl    xEF xBB xBF      xargs vim -e -c  argdo set fileencoding utf-8 set encoding utf-8  set nobomb  wq

User · Answer

This works for me  def removeBOMs fileName        BOMs              Bytes as CP1252 characters                                                                v          dL          sfs          sfs         N                            1   3        inputFile   open fileName   r        contents   inputFile read        for BOM in BOMs           if not BOM in contents  no BOM in the file                 pass          else               newContents   contents replace BOM     1               newFile   open fileName   w                newFile write newContents               return None

User · Answer

Open the PHP file under question  in Notepad     Click on Encoding at the top and change from  Encoding in UTF-8 without BOM  to just  Encoding in UTF-8   Save and overwrite the file on your server

User · Answer

In Notepad    choose the  Encoding  menu  then  Encode in UTF-8 without BOM   Then save   See Stack Overflow question How to make Notepad to save text in UTF-8 without BOM

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Three words for you   Byte Order Mark  BOM   That s the representation for the UTF-8 BOM in ISO-8859-1  You have to tell your editor to not use BOMs or use a different editor to strip them out   To automatize the BOM s removal you can use awk as shown in this question   As another answer says  the best would be for PHP to actually interpret the BOM correctly  for that you can use mb internal encoding    like this     lt  php      Storing the previous encoding in case you have some other piece       of code sensitive to encoding and counting on the default value            previous encoding   mb internal encoding          Set the encoding to UTF-8  so when reading files it ignores the BOM           mb internal encoding  UTF-8          Process the CSS files          Finally  return to the previous encoding    mb internal encoding  previous encoding         Rest of the code        gt

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Open your file in Notepad    From the Encoding menu  select Convert to UTF-8 without BOM  save the file  replace the old file with this new file  And it will work  damn sure

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For those with shell access here is a little command to find all files with the BOM set in the public html directory - be sure to change it to what your correct path on your server is  Code   grep -rl    xEF xBB xBF   home username public html   and if you are comfortable with the vi editor  open the file in vi   vi  path-to-file-name file php   And enter the command to remove the BOM   set nobomb   Save the file   wq

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I don t know PHP  so I don t know if this is possible  but the best solution would be to read the file as UTF-8 rather than some other encoding  The BOM is actually a ZERO WIDTH NO BREAK SPACE  This is whitespace  so if the file were being read in the correct encoding  UTF-8   then the BOM would be interpreted as whitespace and it would be ignored in the resulting CSS file   Also  another advantage of reading the file in the correct encoding is that you don t have to worry about characters being misinterpreted  Your editor is telling you that the code page you want to save it in won t do all the characters that you need  If PHP is then reading the file in the incorrect encoding  then it is very likely that other characters besides the BOM are being silently misinterpreted  Use UTF-8 everywhere  and these problems disappear

User · Answer

If you need to be able to remove the BOM from UTF-8 encoded files  you first need to get hold of an editor that is aware of them   I personally use E Text Editor   In the bottom right  there are options for character encoding  including the BOM tag  Load your file  deselect Byte Order Marker if it is selected  resave  and it should be done   Alt text http   oth4 com encoding png  E is not free  but there is a free trial  and it is an excellent editor  limited TextMate compatibility

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In PHPStorm  for multiple files and BOM not necessarily at the beginning of the file  you can search  x FEFF   Regular Expression  and replace with nothing

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Here is another good solution for the problem with BOM  These are two VBScript   vbs  scripts   One for finding the BOM in a file and one for KILLING the damned BOM in the file  It works pretty fine and is easy to use   Just create a  vbs file  and paste the following code in it   You can use the VBScript script simply by dragging and dropping the suspicious file onto the  vbs file  It will tell you if there is a BOM or not     Heiko Jendreck - personal helpdesk  amp  webdesign   http   www phw-jendreck de   2010 05 10 Vers 1 0     find BOM vbs                          Kleines Hilfsmittel  welches das BOM finden soll    Const UTF8 BOM             Const UTF16BE BOM           Const UTF16LE BOM           Const ForReading   1  Const ForWriting   2  Dim fso  Set fso   WScript CreateObject  Scripting FileSystemObject    Dim f  f   WScript Arguments Item 0   Dim t  t   fso OpenTextFile f  ForReading  ReadAll  If Left t  3    UTF8 BOM Then      MsgBox  UTF-8-BOM detected    ElseIf Left t  2    UTF16BE BOM Then      MsgBox  UTF-16-BOM  Big Endian  detected    ElseIf Left t  2    UTF16LE BOM Then      MsgBox  UTF-16-BOM  Little Endian  detected    Else      MsgBox  No BOM detected    End If   If it tells you there is BOM  go and create the second  vbs file with the following code and drag the suspicios file onto the  vbs file     Heiko Jendreck - personal helpdesk  amp  webdesign   http   www phw-jendreck de   2010 05 10 Vers 1 0     kill BOM vbs                          Kleines Hilfmittel  welches das gefundene BOM l  schen soll   Const UTF8 BOM            Const ForReading   1 Const ForWriting   2 Dim fso Set fso   WScript CreateObject  Scripting FileSystemObject   Dim f f   WScript Arguments Item 0  Dim t t   fso OpenTextFile f  ForReading  ReadAll If Left t  3    UTF8 BOM Then     fso OpenTextFile f  ForWriting  Write  Mid t  4       MsgBox  BOM gel  scht   Else     MsgBox  Kein UTF-8-BOM vorhanden   End If   The code is from Heiko Jendreck

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In PHP  you can do the following to remove all non characters including the character in question    response   preg replace     x00- x1F x80- xFF          response

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Same problem  different solution   One line in the PHP file was printing out XML headers  which use the same begin end tags as PHP   Looks like the code within these tags set the encoding  and was executed within PHP which resulted in the strange characters  Either way here s the solution     Original  xml string     amp lt  xml version   1 0   encoding   UTF-8    amp gt       fixed  xml string     lt       xml version   1 0   encoding   UTF-8         gt

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You can open it by PhpStorm and right-click on your file and click on Remove BOM

User · Answer

Same problem  but it only affected one file so I just created a blank file  copy pasted the code from the original file to the new file  and then replaced the original file  Not fancy but it worked

User · Answer

I had the same problem  The problem was because one of my php files was in utf-8  the most important  the configuaration file which is included in all php files    In my case  I had 2 different solutions which worked for me     First  I changed the Apache Configuration by using AddDefaultCharsetDirective in configuration files  or in  htaccess   This solution forces Apache to use the correct encodage   AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1   The second solution was to change the bad encoding of the php file

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I had the same problem with the BOM appearing in some of my PHP files                  If you use PhpStorm you can set at hotkey to remove it in Settings -  IDE Settings -  Keymap -  Main Menu -   File -  Remove BOM

User · Answer

Use Total Commander to search for all BOMed files   Elegant way to search for UTF-8 files with BOM    Open these files in some proper editor  that recognizes BOM  like Eclipse  Change the file s encoding to ISO  right click  properties   Cut        from the beginning of the file  save Change the file s encoding back to UTF-8      and do not even think about using n   d again

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Copy the text of your filename css file  Close your css file  Rename it filename2 css to avoid a filename clash  In MS Notepad or Wordpad  create a new file  Paste the text into it  Save it as filename css  selecting UTF-8 from the encoding options  Upload filename css

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For me  this worked         lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt    If I remove this meta  the        appears again  Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

Check on your index php  find      charset iso-8859-1  and replace it with      charset utf-8    Maybe it ll work

User · Answer

BOM is just a sequence of characters   EF  BB  BF for UTF-8   so just remove them using scripts or configure the editor so it s not added   From Removing BOM from UTF-8      usr bin perl  file  lt  gt    file 0     s   xEF xBB xBF    print  file     I am sure it translates to PHP easily

User · Answer

You can use  vim -e -c  argdo set fileencoding utf-8 set encoding utf-8  set nobomb  wq    Replacing with awk seems to work  but it is not in place

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