utf8 without BOM encoding in eclipse

Asked 11/5, 2012 at 10:12 Answered 28/7, 2015 at 7:56

After some headache I figured out that eclipse using set encoding UTF8 (with BOM) causes an error. It causes whitespace to be added when you use an include causing the headers of a webpage to render within the body in chrome.

ie. on index.php with no gap before or after the of course

<?php include_once('header.php'); ?><body>test</body>

and header.php having (without gaps again of course)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>test title</title>
</head>

Then the test title appears within the body (not in view source, but in the console in chrome). This causes a gap at the top of the page.

Opening the index.php and header.php in notepad++ and changing the encoding to UTF8 without BOM solves the problem. How can I fix this in Eclipse?! Switching to notepad++ is not desireable, too many good features in eclipse that are useful (better autocomplete, automatic versioning etc).

A mystery to me...

Romanism answered 11/5, 2012 at 10:12 Comment(4)

File -> Properties -> Resource -> Text Encoding. However I don't see tge BOM option .... – Sheetfed 11/5, 2012 at 10:14

thats the problem, i can only change to UTF8 with BOM which doesn't help.. – Romanism 11/5, 2012 at 10:16

Take a look here – Sheetfed 11/5, 2012 at 10:19

:( so im stuck with converting each file manually with notepad++ then... – Romanism 11/5, 2012 at 10:20

In eclipse, just change the encoding of the file to iso (Right click on file - > Properties) and delete the first three BOM characters, save file and reopen it.

Utrillo answered 28/7, 2015 at 7:56 Comment(1)

I found it easier to use Edit->Set Encoding. Set it to ISO, delete the characters, save, set it back to UTF-8. No need to close and reopen the file. – Timberlake 13/5, 2016 at 21:34

As far as I'm aware, as long as your workspace (or file-type) settings are set to UTF-8, new BOMs are not created for new files, but old BOMs (created in other editors) will be maintained or even displayed depending on what editor is opening the file (PHP editor, vs PHP+HTML editor).

If you're having random BOMs in your file, it's probably because someone on your team is using a different editor with BOMs on by default (hello, Dreamweaver!). Whenever this person creates a new file, a BOM will be inserted and maintained both by your and his editor (but if one of you removes it it's going to be fine).

If you're bash-savvy, I'd suggest using the following script to prune BOMs in bulk:

sed '1 s/\xEF\xBB\xBF//' < input > output

BOM Magic source: http://thegreyblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/shell-script-to-find-and-remove-bom.html

Loleta answered 4/3, 2013 at 11:7 Comment(1)

Good solution, the bash published in the site is very useful as it can process many files in one row. – Shabuoth 12/12, 2013 at 13:45

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