UTF-8 and BOM: Difference between revisions

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* See [http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom.en.php Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM]
* See [http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom.en.php Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM]
* Some text editors add a BOM by default, for example Windows' Notepad.
* Some text editors add a BOM by default, for example Windows' Notepad.
* When exporting from OpenOffice Calc the BOM sneaks in even after the first delimiter!


== How can I detect a BOM? ==
== How can I detect a BOM? ==

Revision as of 08:02, 24 March 2010


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?

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.
  • When exporting from OpenOffice Calc the BOM sneaks in even after the first delimiter!

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.

Calc-export BOM.png

The picture shows an exported CSV file from OpenOffice Calc where the BOM (#FEFF) creeps in even after the first delimiter!

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++.

See also