note 46874 added to function.file-get-contents

If you're opening text files encoded in UTF-8, you might get several (3 in my case) control characters at the start of the string. The reason is that file_get_contents() is binary safe, so you get every byte of the given file, and that very often, when saving text as UTF-8, text editors (I'm looking at you BBedit) save it by default with a "BOM" (Byte Order Mark). These characters are non-printable, so you can't see them if you echo() them. To check what's really going on, you can use this: <?php $str = file_get_contents('my_utf-8_file.txt'); echo $str{0}.' => '.ord($str{0})."\n"; echo $str{1}.' => '.ord($str{1})."\n"; echo $str{2}.' => '.ord($str{2})."\n"; echo $str{3}.' => '.ord($str{3})."\n"; ?> You can learn more about UTF-8 and BOM here: http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+46874 Delete -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes Reason: bad code -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes&reason=bad+code Reason: spam -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes&reason=spam Reason: useless example -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes&reason=useless+example Reason: contains commercial links -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes&reason=contains+commercial+links Reason: useless note -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+46874&report=yes&reason=useless+note Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+46874&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php