PDA

Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Strange Characters

brooks
10-26-2004, 08:08 PM
Hey all. This is my first post here.

I was working on my website and I noticed some strange characters in the upper left-hand corner at the top of the page. They just started popping up today and were not there before. And they only show up in Mozilla Firefox.

The characters are this: 

When I run it through the validator - it shows this before my DOCTYPE:
��»¿<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www

but the first character on the file is the "<" so I don't see where that's coming from.

Feel free to look for yourself: http://www.moheads.com

I think it might be some kind of encoding problem?

Thanks in advance!
Stephen Philbin
10-26-2004, 11:10 PM
My guess is that you're using some word processing software to make your documents. This is a very bad thing and causes problems very much like you are describing.

Instead try using a proper html editor such as araneae (http://www.ornj.net/software/araneae/).
Jupac
10-26-2004, 11:12 PM
I loveAraneae (http://www.ornj.net/software/araneae/) its the best. PWNS notpad.exe
brooks
10-26-2004, 11:56 PM
I'm using UltraEdit-32. Which is pretty standard text editor. Nothing fancy. So I don't think that's causing the problem.
Stephen Philbin
10-27-2004, 12:26 AM
Originally posted by lakers01
I loveAraneae (http://www.ornj.net/software/araneae/) its the best. PWNS notpad.exe

Rispick teh line counter joo n00blar!!!11!!oneone!1!!

Seriously though. If it ain't your editor then check your character encoding then.

Failing that, ask someone that knows what they're doing. ;)
brooks
10-27-2004, 08:30 AM
Right - that's my question. What should the encoding be?
Stephen Philbin
10-27-2004, 11:55 AM
I usually use utf 8.
brooks
10-27-2004, 03:44 PM
I figured it out:

The file is encoded as UTF-8. There is an option in this type of encoding to have a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file. My text editor, as a default, adds the BOM to all *new* files. And since I re-created the index page of moheads.com (as well as the interview pages) yesterday - they have the BOM characters at the top of the screen. I've turned off the BOM in the text editor and I'm all good now.
Stephen Philbin
10-27-2004, 04:02 PM
Cool. Good to see you're sorted. :D

See that folks! I was almost helpful there! :D