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 mysterious character

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  • 29-02-2012 11:25am
    #1
    komodosp
    Registered Users Posts: 1,657 ✭✭✭


    Hi folks... I've come across an odd one...

    I've been working on a website (based on Prestashop, this applies to the CMS pages which are entered by a WYSIWYG editor), and noticed that an extra unwanted line break seems to appear after some articles.

    Anyway, inspecting it in Firebug, I've found that the extra break is due to this character at the end of a paragraph.

    #62579;
    (with an & before it)
    which according to d'internet is "Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE' (U+FEFF)"

    If I delete it in Firebug, my site looks fine with the spacing between paragraphs being correct.

    But if I view the html source, it doesn't appear!. In fact there's nothing unusual at all in the source code, which goes along the lines of 
    <div class="customer_testimonial">
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod 
tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, 
quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. 
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu 
fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in 
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum<br /> 
<strong>Lorem Ipsum - November 2011</strong>&#65279;</p>
</div>
    ...with the annoying character appearing (in Firebug) between the </strong> and </p> sometimes. (I am displaying a bunch of those testimonials on the same page and usually they are fine. But the odd one has that)

    194696.jpg


    Anyone have any idea what this is?


Comments

  • Options
    #2
    Opinicus
    Closed Accounts Posts: 816 ✭✭✭Opinicus


    something to do with the character encoding differences between the environments?

    Are they both UTF-8 or whatever?

    (no real experience with this stuff, just thinking out loud)


  • Options
    #3
    onemorechance
    Registered Users Posts: 3,078 ✭✭✭onemorechance


    http://www.sttmedia.com/unicode-byteordermark

    Byte Order Mark (BOM)

    The Unicode Byte Order Mark is a Unicode character, that displays the endianness of a Unicode file or stream. This character has the Unicode position U+FEFF and can also be used to determine the coding of a text file. The character always comes first in the file and is not interpreted as part of the text by the software that supports the corresponding format. An advantage of this technique is that no additional information must be supplied and the key for interpretation is located directly in the file.

    ...

    The program Text Converter mentioned further down in the article quoted might be useful to you.


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