UTF-8 and BOM
With the Database Activity there still seems to be a problem importing UTF-8 files with BOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark).
See this forum discussion for an example in Hebrew http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=62251#p559428
See also this tracker issues: http://tracker.moodle.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&query=bom&summary=true&description=true&body=true&sorter/field=updated&sorter/order=DESC
--Frank Ralf 10:36, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
What does BOM mean?
- BOM stands for "Byte Order Mark".
- Byte Order Mark (BOM) FAQ by the Unicode Consortium.
- "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" from Joel on Software
What is it good for?
It is used for multibyte characters to mark the order in which the bytes appear.
What's the problem with the BOM?
- See Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM
- Some text editors add a BOM by default, for example Windows' Notepad.
How can I detect a BOM?
You will need a text editor which is capable of showing special Unicode characters. A good Unicode text editor for Windows is SC UniPad.
How can I get rid of the BOM?
Any of the above mentioned Unicode capable text editors will allow you to remove a BOM, some even automatically when opening or saving a file.
Some other text editors will save files without BOM, e.g. Notepad++.
