The extra characters at the beginning of the file are: EF BB BF

  • Thread starter Thread starter AAaron123
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A

AAaron123

I have some .htm files that I don't know how they were created but if I look
at them with a hex viewer they have 3 extra characters at the beginning.
They don't show in notepad but they screw up my html editor.

The extra characters at the beginning of the file are: EF BB BF

Do these mean any thing to you.

Can you guess how they got there?


Thanks
 
In AAaron123 typed on Wed, 7 Oct 2009 20:05:57 -0400:
I have some .htm files that I don't know how they were created but if
I look at them with a hex viewer they have 3 extra characters at the
beginning. They don't show in notepad but they screw up my html
editor.
The extra characters at the beginning of the file are: EF BB BF

Do these mean any thing to you.

Can you guess how they got there?


Thanks
Click to expand...

That is a byte-order mark (BOM). It means it is in Unicode UTF-8 format.
 
You might try using Notepad to save the file as ANSI, which your HTML editor
probably can handle. The save will complain if the file contains characters
that can't be converted to plain 8-bit characters. If ANSI doesn't work
out, you might try saving as Unicode (little endian). In today's
multinational world, HTML editors should be able to handle the common
encodings like UTF-8, which uses anywhere from one to four bytes to
represent each of the 65536 potential Unicode characters (code points).

-Paul Randall
 
Paul said:
You might try using Notepad to save the file as ANSI, which your HTML
editor probably can handle. The save will complain if the file
contains characters that can't be converted to plain 8-bit
characters. If ANSI doesn't work out, you might try saving as
Unicode (little endian). In today's multinational world, HTML
editors should be able to handle the common encodings like UTF-8,
which uses anywhere from one to four bytes to represent each of the
65536 potential Unicode characters (code points).
-Paul Randall
Click to expand...

I did that. I opened the file in Notepad and saved it as a text document
and that fixed it.

I glad you replied though, becuse I didn't know if I might have messed
something up but you said it would complain if it had characters it couldn't
convert. That's good to know.

Thanks
 
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