BOM Characters can cause issues in your website
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

there a small characters put in your files text editors..

the last few weeks iv'e fixed a few sites with BOM trouble and there hard to find because you cant see them.

below is a script to find them out, run this script from your public_html folder and see if it can seek any out.

once found open the file in notepad++ and go to the drop-down menu "Encoding" and select "Encode UTF-8 Without BOM".

Save and upload the file and should be fixed.

BOM cases issues like "headers already sent" and invalid code when trying to validate html with w3c.

PHP Code: 
<!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>PHP BOM Finder</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <style type="text/css">
        body { font-family: arial, verdana, sans-serif }
        p { margin-left: 20px }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>UTF-8 BOM seek</h1>
    <p>

<?php

$total = CheckDir( '../');

echo '<br /> Number of files with UTF-8 BOM: ', $total ;

function CheckDir( $sourceDir )
{
    $counter = 0 ;

    $sourceDir = FixDirSlash( $sourceDir ) ;

    // Copy files and directories.
    $sourceDirHandler = opendir( $sourceDir ) ;

    while ( $file = readdir( $sourceDirHandler ) )
    {
        // Skip ".", ".." and hidden fields (Unix).
        if ( substr( $file, 0, 1 ) == '.' )
            continue ;

        $sourcefilePath = $sourceDir . $file ;

        if ( is_dir( $sourcefilePath ) )
        {
            $counter += CheckDir( $sourcefilePath ) ;
        }

        if ( !is_file( $sourcefilePath ) || @GetFileExtension( $sourcefilePath ) != 'php' || !CheckUtf8Bom( $sourcefilePath ) ){
            echo 'CLEAN:'.$sourcefilePath. '<br />' ;
        }else{
        echo 'DETECTED:'.$sourcefilePath. '<br />' ;
        }

        $counter++ ;
    }

    return $counter ;
}

function FixDirSlash( $dirPath )
{
    $dirPath = str_replace( '\\', '/', $dirPath ) ;

    if ( substr( $dirPath, -1, 1 ) != '/' )
        $dirPath .= '/' ;

    return $dirPath ;
}

function GetFileExtension( $filePath )
{
    $info = pathinfo( $filePath ) ;
    return $info['extension'] ;
}

function CheckUtf8Bom( $filePath )
{
    $data = file_get_contents( $filePath ) ;

    return ( substr( $data, 0, 3 ) == "\xEF\xBB\xBF" ) ;
}
?>

</p>
</body>
</html>
Just save it and run it then delete after your finished.
Peace
litewarez Reviewed by litewarez on . BOM Detection cleaner! BOM Characters can cause issues in your website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark there a small characters put in your files text editors.. the last few weeks iv'e fixed a few sites with BOM trouble and there hard to find because you cant see them. below is a script to find them out, run this script from your public_html folder and see if it can seek any out. once found open the file in notepad++ and go to the drop-down menu "Encoding" and select "Encode UTF-8 Without Rating: 5