[SOLVED] Weird Space/Character in Search Form

This one is beyond me! I’ve looked and looked, tried different versions, and searching.

There is some odd character causing havoc to my layout across browser platforms. You can see it right at the end of the arrow in the image below. This period like character caused the space highlighted in red in the other image. It would not be a big deal if all browsers treated it the same.

It’s interesting to note that I found the same thing on the demo site "http://www.modx.wangba.fr/index.php?id=257" in version 1.8.3 but not 1.8.4!? Your next question is did I try the 1.8.4... yep, same problem, the screen shots were made on version 1.8.4.

I can’t figure this one out.

Thanks in advance.

Okay check this out...

I was able to copy and paste this illusive character in both google search and the ajaxsearch. Google came up with nothing but the ajaxsearch returned the result you see in the attached screen shot.

Can you make heads or tails of this?

Sorry for the monologue but I’m hoping these developments aid in finding the solution...

I changed the character encoding in the manager to "US-ASCII - us-ascii" and this character turned up -> 

What is this?

Solution:

This may only apply to my scenario because my database uses SET_NAMES rather than Unicode. I opened "layout.tpl.html" in notepad and saved it as ANSI encoding. I also did "paging.tpl.html" based on another post but I don’t think that file had anything to do with my problem.

8 hours gone but problem solved!



Long live MODx!!

That is a UTF-8 "BOM", so using ANSI works
But if you are using UTF-8, a better solution would be to edit the file encoded without the BOM!

Notepad++ rocks! Or if you using UTF-8 and edit the file through the manager you can see and remove it.

Thanks mrhaw!

Now thats the answer I was looking for! After a little research on "UTF-8 BOM" I’ve think it was most likely the editing/saving the file in Dreamweaver that was causing trouble.

I installed Notepad++(thanks) and converted to UTF-8 without BOM and it worked great. I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t see that elusive character even in Notepad++, I may have overlooked something but I tried many different encodings and it wouldn’t show. No matter really, it works!

Thanks again,

schoeds

That is because Notepad++ reads the encoding just fine!

Quote from: Wikipedia

Some text editing software in a UTF-8 environment on MS Windows adds a BOM to the beginning of text files. If the page is displayed in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), the three bytes show up as  (i+umlaut, double right guillemet, inverted question mark).