How do I remove  from the beginning of a file?

Question

Three words for you:

Byte Order Mark (BOM)

That's the representation for the UTF-8 BOM in ISO-8859-1. You have to tell your editor to not use BOMs or use a different editor to strip them out.

To automatize the BOM's removal you can use awk as shown in this question.

As another answer says, the best would be for PHP to actually interpret the BOM correctly, for that you can use mb_internal_encoding(), like this:

 <?php
   //Storing the previous encoding in case you have some other piece 
   //of code sensitive to encoding and counting on the default value.      
   $previous_encoding = mb_internal_encoding();

   //Set the encoding to UTF-8, so when reading files it ignores the BOM       
   mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

   //Process the CSS files...

   //Finally, return to the previous encoding
   mb_internal_encoding($previous_encoding);

   //Rest of the code...
  ?>

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.

In PHP, you can do the following to remove all non characters including the character in question.

$response = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/', '', $response);

For those with shell access here is a little command to find all files with the BOM set in the public_html directory - be sure to change it to what your correct path on your server is

Code:

grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF' /home/username/public_html

and if you are comfortable with the vi editor, open the file in vi:

vi /path-to-file-name/file.php

And enter the command to remove the BOM:

set nobomb

Save the file:

wq

BOM is just a sequence of characters ($EF $BB $BF for UTF-8), so just remove them using scripts or configure the editor so it's not added.

From Removing BOM from UTF-8:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@file=<>;
$file[0] =~ s/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//;
print(@file);

I am sure it translates to PHP easily.

I don't know PHP, so I don't know if this is possible, but the best solution would be to read the file as UTF-8 rather than some other encoding. The BOM is actually a ZERO WIDTH NO BREAK SPACE. This is whitespace, so if the file were being read in the correct encoding (UTF-8), then the BOM would be interpreted as whitespace and it would be ignored in the resulting CSS file.

Also, another advantage of reading the file in the correct encoding is that you don't have to worry about characters being misinterpreted. Your editor is telling you that the code page you want to save it in won't do all the characters that you need. If PHP is then reading the file in the incorrect encoding, then it is very likely that other characters besides the BOM are being silently misinterpreted. Use UTF-8 everywhere, and these problems disappear.

For me, this worked:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

If I remove this meta, the  appears again. Hope this helps someone...