Funky characters in FireFox

31 Mar 2008, 8:45 PM

#1

hedera

Zen Follower

Join Date:: Nov 2007
Posts:: 128
Plugin Contributions:: 0

Funky characters in FireFox

My ZC site, still in development, shows weird characters at the top of the page, only in FireFox:

http://67.199.28.10/ZenCart/

FF Web Developer tells me it looks like this:

ï»¿ï»¿ï»¿ï»¿<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

I read the extended thread on countingsheep's problem, where the same thing happened. I've corrected the gunk in stylesheet.css, ditto in /languages/english/LifeRing/header.php, but I still have the junk and I can't find any other files that have it. I checked all the files that were mentioned to countingsheep and they all look fine.

I tried searching with the Developer Tool Kit and it said it couldn't find anything - and that was BEFORE I cleaned up the stylesheet and the header.php. Any suggestions on where this junque may be??

21 Jul 2008, 10:06 PM

#2

hedera

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Join Date:: Nov 2007
Posts:: 128
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Re: Funky characters in FireFox

I now have more information on this but I still haven't solved it. Background:

My site, https://www.liferingtest.com, is now at ZenCart 1.3.8a. With the upgrade, all these pothooks went away except one set in the top left corner of every page. I believe that the pothooks were added to various files when I edited them with Microsoft Expression Web; I've stopped using that. I've also gone through all the files that still had them (identified by Windows Grep) and removed them.

When I view source in Web Developer, it shows me this line:

ï»¿<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

I've gone through my entire site directory with Windows Grep and this character string, ï»¿, doesn't exist anywhere - and yet it shows on my page. How do I get rid of it - it looks really bad.

21 Jul 2008, 11:11 PM

#3

barco57

Totally Zenned

Join Date:: Apr 2006
Location:: West Salem, IL
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Re: Funky characters in FireFox

"ï»¿" is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8.

Probably what it means is that you are using a text editor that is saving files in UTF-8 with the BOM.

21 Jul 2008, 11:46 PM

#4

hedera

Zen Follower

Join Date:: Nov 2007
Posts:: 128
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Re: Funky characters in FireFox

Well, at least I know what it is. And I was using a text editor that did that; but I've stopped using it, and AFAIK there are No More of these objects in my files, but there's still one in the upper left corner ... How can I get rid of it if I can't find it??

22 Jul 2008, 12:29 PM

#5

barco57

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Join Date:: Apr 2006
Location:: West Salem, IL
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Re: Funky characters in FireFox

Its in one of the files that you have touched somewhere, a language file, a template file. Work through them one by one and change the .php to .bak then refresh til the offending file shows it self.

17 Jan 2009, 5:28 PM

#6

richiesriches

New Zenner

Join Date:: Oct 2007
Posts:: 3
Plugin Contributions:: 0

Re: Funky characters in FireFox

I had the same problem and finally figured out what it was...so here is all the information...

My MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

so I had to change 2 lines in 2 files and it works perfectly now.

/includes/languages/english.php
/admin/includes/languages/english.php

look for
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.ISO_8859-1');

and change it to
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_US.utf8');

then look for
define('CHARSET', 'iso-8859-1');

and change it to
define('CHARSET', 'uft-8');

Do this in both files, and those error characters will not show up any more. :-)

I hope this helps someone!!!