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 prepended to it: 

PHP removes all whitespace, so a random  in the middle of the code messes up the entire thing. As I mentioned, I can't actually see these characters when I open the file in gedit, so I can't remove them very easily.

I googled the problem, and there is clearly something wrong with the file encoding, which makes sense being as I've been shifting the files around to different Linux/Windows servers via ftp and rsync, with a range of text editors. I don't really know much about character encoding though, so help would be appreciated.

If it helps, the file is being saved in UTF-8 format, and gedit won't let me save it in ISO-8859-15 format (the document contains one or more characters that cannot be encoded using the specified character encoding). I tried saving it with Windows and Linux line endings, but neither helped.

Answer 1

In Notepad++, choose the "Encoding" menu, then "Encode in UTF-8 without BOM". Then save.

See Stack Overflow question How to make Notepad to save text in UTF-8 without BOM?.

Answer 2

Check on your index.php, find "... charset=iso-8859-1" and replace it with "... charset=utf-8".

Maybe it'll work.

Answer 3

grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF' * | xargs vim -e -c 'argdo set fileencoding=utf-8|set encoding=utf-8| set nobomb| wq'

Answer 4

Open your file in Notepad++. From the Encoding menu, select Convert to UTF-8 without BOM, save the file, replace the old file with this new file. And it will work, damn sure.

Answer 5

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 6

Same problem, but it only affected one file so I just created a blank file, copy/pasted the code from the original file to the new file, and then replaced the original file. Not fancy but it worked.