Since yesterday, my server is adding some garbage characters to any script in PHP. If I look at my code with view source, I see some spaces and if I display a JSON string, it is considered invalid.
If I take this simple example:
<?PHP
echo "hello";
?>
It displays hello but in the source code I see a blank line before hello. The encoding of the file is in UTF8 without BOM (did it with Notepad++)
If I use file_get_contents to load the PHP file and then use rawurlencode before outputting the content, I get the following garbage before hello:
%EF%BB%BF%EF%BB%BF%EF%BB%BF
My first thought was that it was an encoding issue but I checked the concerned PHP file(s) and they are all in UTF8 without BOM. The only solution I have found is to remove this string of garbage each time before treating the content of a file.
I'm using Wordpress and the problem suddenly appeared yesterday while I had not modified any file.
Do you have any idea?
Thanks
Laurent
The structure of this XML is corrupted because of "include" connection database.
As you can see, there are strange characters in the first line of the file ('╗ ┐' ╗ ┐).
However, they do not appear on the web, since they only appear when I use cmd.exe to type the file. Here is a screenshot of the offending file:
Here's the URL of the file:
http://web.wipix.com.br/aniversariantes.xml
In my PHP file, I have two "includes" in the files connection.php (connection to database) AND "serialize.php" to generate the XML.
This only works if I take out the "includes" and use everything on one page only. How can I fix this?
That is a byte order mark (Unicode character U+FEFF) but it being displayed in an incorrect encoding. Since your document claims to be encoded as ISO-8859-1 there should not be a byte order mark.
Probably your xml file is in UTF-8 format with BOM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
Remove offending 8 bytes or save your xml without BOM using a text editor.
If xml is dinamically generated, you have to modify the generation code.
Moreover, the BOM bytes seems encoded badly. Probably the xml was converted in a wrong way and BOM bytes were screwed up.
The odd stuff at the beginning could be a byte-order mark, but I'm not sure.
A byte-order mark is a byte sequence inserted at the beginning of a file used to indicate the endianness of it, or whether the most significant byte comes first.
From your output, there are other weird characters (not text) in the file, so it is possible that the program inserted them in.
I have a python program running very well. It connects to several websites and outputs the desired information. Since not all websites are encoded with utf-8, I am requesting the charset from the headers and using unicode(string, encoding) method to decode (I am not sure whether its the appropriate way to do this but it works pretty well). When I run the python program I receive no ??? marks and it works fine. But when I run the program using php's system function, I receive this error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 41: ordinal not in range(128)
This is a python specific error but what confuses me is that I don't receive this error when I run the program using the terminal. I only receive this when I use php's system function and call the program from php. What may be the cause behind this problem?
Here is a sample code:
php code that calls python program:
system("python somefile.py $search") // where $search is the variable coming from an input
python code:
encoding = "iso-8859-9"
l = "some string here with latin characters"
print unicode("<div class='line'>%s</div>" % l, encoding)
# when I run this code from terminal it works perfect and I receive no ??? marks
# when I run this code from php, I receive the error above
From the PrintFails wiki:
When Python finds its output attached to a terminal, it sets the
sys.stdout.encoding attribute to the terminal's encoding. The print
statement's handler will automatically encode unicode arguments into
str output.
This is why your program works when called from the terminal.
When Python does not detect the desired character set of the
output, it sets sys.stdout.encoding to None, and print will invoke the
"ascii" codec.
This is why your program fails when called from php.
To make it work when called from php, you need to make explicit what encoding print should use. For example, to make explicit that you want the output encoded in utf-8 (when not attached to a terminal):
ENCODING = sys.stdout.encoding if sys.stdout.encoding else 'utf-8'
print unicode("<div class='line'>%s</div>" % l, encoding).encode(ENCODING)
Alternatively, you could set the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable.
Then your code should work without changes (both from the terminal and when called from php).
When you run the python script in your terminal, your terminal is likely to be encoded in UTF8 (specially if you are using linux or mac).
When you set l variable to "some string with latin characters", that string will be encoded to the default encoding, if you are using a terminal l will be UTF8 and the script wont crash.
A little tip: if you have a string encoded in latin1 and you want it in unicode you can do:
variable.decode('latin1')
I have made a form where a user writes his message in Arabic and submits it by a submit button. The message is saved in database and I need to create a .txt file on the server for some other application which shows something like this :
د پوليسو Ù¾Ø
I successfully used the fopen, fwrite functions to create my txt files.
When I open the file in notepad the Arabic text is shown correctly
but when I open it in eclipse I get something like this :
د پوليسو پر روزنيز مرکز توغندويي بريد وشو
Well afterwards when I save the txt file in notepad as utf-8 encoding the above unknown stuff changes to Arabic.
But I cant do that manually for every message.
I searched a lot on the internet and did these:
I saved the script in utf-8
I used utf8_encode function
I set this too ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
this too <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8; encoding=utf-8" />
I change the parameter in fwrite to "wb" where b is for binary
Any solution to this problem ill be very glad I have continuously worked on this issue for the last week. I know the problem is in the encoding so how can I write utf-8 encoded files using PHP?
If the text displays fine in one program but not another, that just means one program interprets the file correctly while the other doesn't. Most likely Notepad sets a UTF-8 BOM on the file when you save it again, so Eclipse now automatically recognizes that it's UTF-8 encoded. Without that, Eclipse assumes latin-1 or some other encoding as the default.
Two options:
change your Eclipse preferences to open files as UTF-8 by default
set a BOM on the file when writing it, see Encoding a string as UTF-8 with BOM in PHP
A BOM can be helpful for making programs recognize UTF-8 but can also cause problems in other programs that don't expect or want BOMs. Whether to use a BOM or not depends on your intended use and target audience.
In eclipse you need to set your encoding in menu Edit > Set Encoding...
I have encountered a similar problem described here (and in other places) -
where as on an ajax callback I get a xmlhttp.responseText that seems ok (when I alert it - it shows the right text) - but when using an 'if' statement to compare it to the string - it returns false.
(I am also the one who wrote the server-side code returning that string) - after much studying the string - I've discovered that the string had an "invisible character" as its first character. A character that was not shown. If I copied it to Notepad - then deleted the first character - it won't delete until pressing Delete again.
I did a charCodeAt(0) for the returned string in xmlhttp.responseText. And it returned 65279.
Googling it reveals that it is some sort of a UTF-8 control character that is supposed to set "big-endian" or "small-endian" encoding.
So, now I know the cause of the problem - but... why does that character is being echoed?
In the source php I simply use
echo 'the string'...
and it apparently somehow outputs [chr(65279)]the string...
Why? And how can I avoid it?
To conclude, and specify the solution:
Windows Notepad adds the BOM character (the 3 bytes: EF BB BF) to files saved with utf-8 encoding.
PHP doesn't seem to be bothered by it - unless you include one php file into another -
then things get messy and strings gets displayed with character(65279) prepended to them.
You can edit the file with another text editor such as Notepad++ and use the encoding
"Encode in UTF-8 without BOM",
and this seems to fix the problem.
Also, you can save the other php file with ANSI encoding in notepad - and this also seem to work (that is, in case you actually don't use any extended characters in the file, I guess...)
If you want to print a string that contains the ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE char (e.g., by including an external non-PHP file), try the following code:
echo preg_replace("/\xEF\xBB\xBF/", "", $string);
If you are using Linux or Mac, here is an elegant solution to get rid of the character in PHP.
If you are using WordPress (25% of Internet websites are powered by WordPress), the chances are that a plugin or the active theme are introducing the BOM character due a file that contains BOM (maybe that file was edited in Windows). If that's the case, go to your wp-content/themes/ folder and run the following command:
grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF' .
This will search for files with BOM. If you have .php results in the list, then do this:
Rename the file to something like filename.bom.bak.php
Open the file in your editor and copy the content in the clipbard.
Create a new file and paste the content from the clipboard.
Save the file with the original name filename.php
If you are dealing with this locally, then eventually you'd need to re-upload the new files to the server.
If you don't have results after running the grep command and you are using WordPress, then another place to check for BOM files is the /wp-content/plugins folder. Go there and run the command again. Alternatively, you can start deactivating all the plugins and then check if the problem is solved while you active the plugins again.
If you are not using WordPress, then go to the root of your project folder and run the command to find files with BOM. If any file is found, then run the four steps procedure described above.
You can also remove the character in javascript with:
myString = myString.replace(String.fromCharCode(65279), "" );
I had this problem and changed my encoding to utf-8 without bom, Ansi, etc with no luck. My problem was caused by using a php include function in the html body. Moving the include function to above my html (above !DOCTYPE tag) resolved the issue.
After I knew my issue I tested include, include_once and require functions. All attempts to include a file from within the html body created the extra miscellaneous 𐃁 character at the spot where the PHP code would start.
I also tried to assign the result of the include to a variable ... i.e $result = include("myfile.txt"); with the same extra character being added
Please note that moving the include above the HTML would not remove the extra character from showing, however it removes it from my data and out of the content area.
In addition to the above, I just had this issue when pulling some data from a MySQL database (charset is set to UTF-8) - the issue being the HTML tags, I allowed some basic ones like <p> and <a> when I displayed it on the page, I got the 𐃁 character looking through Dev Tools in Chrome.
So I removed the tags from the table and that removed the 𐃁 issue (and the blank line above the where the text was to be displayed.
I just wanted to add to this, since my Rep isn't high enough to actually comment on the answer.
EDIT: Using VIM I was able to remove the BOM with :set nobomb and you can confirm the presence of the BOM with :set bomb? which will display either bomb or nobomb
I use "Dreamweaver CC 2015", by default it has this option enabled: "include BOM signature" or something like that, when you click on save as option from file menu. In the window that apears, you can see "Unicode Options..". You can disable the BOM option. And remeber to change all your files like that. Or you can simply go to preferences and disable the BOM option and save all your files.
I'm using the PhpStorm IDE to develop php pages.
I had this problem and use this option of IDE to remove any BOM characters and problem solved:
File -> Remove BOM
Try to find options like this in your IDE.
Probably something on the server. If you know it's there, I would just bypass it until solved.
myString = myString.substring(1)
Chops off the first character.
When using atom it is a white space on the start of the document before <?php
A Linux solution to find and remove this character from a file is to use sed -i 's/\xEF\xBB\xBF//g' your-filename-here
My solution is create a php file with content:
<?php
header("Content-Type:text/html;charset=utf-8");
?>
Save it as ANSI, then other php file will require/include this before any html or php code