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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T16:32:59+00:00

I have a blog(wordpress based). And try to validate by w3c validator one of

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I have a blog(wordpress based). And try to validate by w3c validator one of my page. The first error is:

Line 1, Column 1: Non-space characters found without seeing a doctype first. Expected <!DOCTYPE html>.
<!DOCTYPE html><!-- HTML 5 -->

Also, DebugBar (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) agree and show two invisible chars before <! when I open the same page from “HTML Check” tab inside this tool. BUT!!

  1. This line of HTML-code come from file header.php in my wordpress theme.
  2. I download this file from my hoster to my local HDD.
  3. The first line of header.php is <!DOCTYPE html><!-- HTML 5 -->
  4. When I open header.php in RJ TextEd (just advanced text editor) it say: current encoding for header.php is UFT-8 without(!) BOM.
  5. When I open header.php in HEX-viewer I see, that byte 0 and 1 is 3c,21 – so it is exactly <!.

So, all things considered, why & where I get these “odd symbols” from?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I found the root of problem. The general rule is:

    If any(absolutely any!) file that take part in construction of the
    code of final HTML-page(the one to be sended to client) has encoding
    with BOM – final HTML-page WILL BE UTF-8-BOM. That is: you whole site
    should NOT contain even 1 file with BOM.

    In my case I have total 1.3K files that make up my site. Only 4 files was BOMed:

    • wp-config.php (in root of site)
    • jquery.query.js (in include folder)
    • cyr-to-lat.php (in plug-in folder)
    • footer.php (in theme root folder)

    And I was forced to re-save every and all of these 4 files as “UFT-8 without BOM” to get rid of “Non-space characters” validation error. When I did this (re-save files) – error is gone.

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