Strange character inserted messing up IE

NOTE: you must go to the blog to see the character; it did not paste in the code above.

Is it the > ?? I don’t see the tiny dot, or perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place.

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enliteart.com%2Fblog%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File.

The Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded files is known to cause problems for some text editors and older browsers. You may want to consider avoiding its use until it is better supported.

Helpful (solution) article:
https://www.95isalive.com/expression/

Thanks for your help. I applied the Expression fix and then re-saved the files but that didn’t change anything. I tried creating a new header.php file and copied the code to it but that didn’t change anything either.

Again, I don’t see the character in the php code; it only shows up in the generated html.

I will look more at it tonight and see what I can find.

DianeV,
The dot is REALLY hard to see in Expression – it appears to take up no space and the code will go right over it. If you enter a “space” on either side of it you see it much better.

Hay it looks like that worked… now… can someone tell me what I just did.

This is what I did to fix the problem:
I opened the php files that I had saved in Expression in notepad and simply did a “save as” changing the encoding from UTF-8 to ANSI. That seemed to do the trick.

Now I don’t really know much about page encoding but I take that to mean the server needs the ANSI encoded php files to create the HTML in UTF-8 (please correct me if I’m wrong).

The real problem I have is I cannot seem to get Expression to save the file in any other encoding. I did the “fix” noted above and tried changing the “site settings” default page encoding to ANSII but it is still saving the php in UTF-8. Thus I guess I will have to do my editing in notepad or find another text editor (what do you guys use?)

Thanks Kafkaesqui for your tip on the encoding. I probably would have figured it out eventually but you saved me a lot of time. If someone could point me to some good reading on page encoding… -it looks like could use a little info in that area.

For Anyone else using Expression you may want to watch for this.

good article here on the BOM https://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/10540.aspx

UPDATE: Re-saved all php files using notepad++ as UTF-8 “without BOM” and all is well.

I think I understand now… I just needed to get rid of the BOM from my php files.

Thanks all.

Hello, i know this thread is 3 months old but i want to say thank you, basially i did what is mentioned in the last post here UPDATE: Re-saved all php files using notepad++ as UTF-8 “without BOM” and all is well.

And it has sorted 2 problems for me, i wasn’t actually getting that strange character on pages, did in WP admin though, i was though experiencing the often mentioned functions.php errors, i also had this problem with my first theme that i had created.

And i had saved mine in UTF-8, so i resaved as you did andyfarmerboy to UTF-8 without BOM and it sorted that but also its sorted a sidebar problem in IE where one sidebar was stretching and a sidebar next to it was pushed out of line, slightly wider than the footer.

From now on instead of notepad il use Notepad++ and save as UTF-8 without BOM.

Absolutely brilliant…thanks for this thread.

I have been chasing my tail all day on this one and it wasn’t until I read this that I remembered I originally edited my index.php in M$ Expression. What a revelation!

Once I had ftp’d the default index.php over my M$ corrupted version, I stepped into the wp-admin editor, pasted my own content code and voila…now IE looks like Firefox…no more left alignment…happily centred now.

Cannot thank you enough andyfarmerboy for sharing your pain with us.