Have you ever seen  appearing on your web pages or SSI, but no idea of how it got there? That is what’s known as a Byte Order Mark or BOM, and it happens to be one of the most annoying little critters you will ever come across (when building web pages, that is).

So what causes , and how do you get rid of it?

There is a pretty technical description on Wikipedia about Byte Order Marks but it probably won’t help the average webmaster. You get a description of what it is (assuming you can understand the tech talk) but no hints on how to deal with it. So here’s the beginners guide.

In simple terms, the BOM is telling you that there is an issue with the characters, and you probably saved something incorrectly. That’s way over simplified, but who needs to know every technical detail….you just want to know how to get rid of it, don’t you?

Using MS Expression Web

This HTML editor is particularly prone to inserting  into your includes or SSI files. There is a very good explanation on BOM and Expression Web here. Follow these instructions and you should have no further problems.

Saving Files Incorrectly

Do you ever save files to something like Notepad, before pasting that into your webpage content? If so, then you may have the wrong save options.

save files with notepad

It’s easy to assume that because the option of saving as UTF-8 is available, that you should do that. But please don’t, that is the most common cause of introducing the BOM into your files! Always save as All files and ANSI.

Your Charset Meta Tag

This is sometimes a last resort, to see if it makes any difference.Check your Meta Tags. Do they say <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″> or do they have <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

If they are UTF-8 then try changing to iso-8859-1 I don’t promise this will fix your problem, but it can do, under certain conditions.

Try using Notepad++

This is one easy way to get rid of those characters. Download and install the free Notepad++.
Get Notepad++

Open up your file in Notepad++, click on the “Format” option,check the “encode in UTF-8 without BOM” and then re-save your file. You should now have a BOM free page.