Elgin Computer Guy

BOM=Byte Order Mark
UTF= Uniform Transformation Format
WTF?! = well, you know…

Whatever happened to just plain old ASCII text?
OK, so UTF is ASCII text, but why in the world would you want HIDDEN characters in your files? Especially if there’s no way to toggle displaying them or not. Thank goodness for good old DOS EDIT.

In my last post I mentioned the problems I had with installing Wordpress on my domain. The culprit was the BOM at the beginning of the wp-config.php file. I edited the file in Microsoft’s Expression Web and it added those weird characters. I fixed it by using “edit” from a DOS prompt. I was able to eliminate those hidden characters and save the file. That allowed the script to work and obviously Wordpress is working now.

I spent about an hour yesterday looking for a way to force Expression Web to NOT use BOM, but no luck. I found a few tutorials that showed how to eliminate it by changing the UTF, but that could come back to bite you as well, as that’s where the language encoding is stored. I guess the short answer is don’t edit PHP files in Expression Web.

Here’s a Wiki article on BOM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark

Here’s one on UTF-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

And finally, here’s the Wiki article on WTF?!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF

Tags: BOM, Expression Web, UTF-8, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 9:26 am and is filed under Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.