|  | Posted by Benjamin Esham on 06/19/26 11:53 
BJY wrote:
 > Benjamin Esham wrote:
 >
 > > Can you show us the beginning of header.inc?  And possibly a hex dump of
 > > the first line or so?  If your file contains a Unicode byte order mark
 > > [1], those are probably the characters messing your file up.
 >
 > The hex dump of the output indeed shows 'junk' which i don't know where it
 > comes from: EF BB BF EF BB BF EF BB BF 3C 48 54 4D 4C ... where the 3C
 > indicates the start of the <HTML tag
 >
 > Any idea what makes PHP spit out this at the start of output?
 
 I think I've found your problem.  From [1]:
 
 | Quite a lot of Windows software (including Windows Notepad) adds one to
 | UTF-8 files. However in Unix-like systems (which make heavy use of text
 | files for configuration) this practice is not recommended, as it will
 | interfere with correct processing of important codes such as the hash-bang
 | at the start of an interpreted script. It may also interfere with source
 | for programming languages that don't recognise it. For example, [...] in
 | PHP, if output buffering is disabled, it has the subtle effect of causing
 | the page to start being sent to the browser, preventing custom headers
 | from being specified by the PHP script. The UTF-8 representation of the
 | BOM is the byte sequence EF BB BF.
 
 It looks like the phantom "EF BB BF" bytes are Unicode BOMs.  (Why there are
 three of them I have no idea.)
 
 Are you using Notepad?  If so, I recommend you use a different editor; if
 not, see if there's an option to turn off the inclusion of the BOM.  If
 you're looking for a new editor, I recommend Vim [2], which has great
 support for bidirectional text editing, although it does have a rather steep
 learning curve.  You might check out the comp.editors group if you have any
 further questions about text editing and editors.
 
 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark
 [2] http://www.vim.org
 
 HTH!
 --
 Benjamin D. Esham
 bdesham@gmail.com  |  AIM: bdesham128  |  Jabber: same as e-mail
 "Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take
 this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor
 the problem which it was intended to solve."       — Karl Popper
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