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 prepend

Answer 1

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:

 <?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...
  ?>

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.