MyBB Documentation

UTF BOM Mark

The 1.6 Documentation is no longer maintained and some information may be outdated.

The MyBB 1.6 series reached end of life on October 1, 2015.

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Usually this error presents itself in the event you were to edit a language file with a text editor, such as Microsoft's® Notepad.

Some applications insert a signature or Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the beginning of UTF-8 text. For example, Microsoft Notepad will always adds a BOM when saving as UTF-8.

Older text editors or browsers will display the BOM as a blank line on-screen, others will display unexpected characters, such as "". This may also occur in the latest browsers if a file that starts with a BOM is included into another file by PHP.


I would recommend Notepad2 to remove the BOM. Notepad2 is a text-editor that enable fast converting between different encoding and line-ending types, and support highlight for many languages. It's very light and a portable application (doesn't need to be installed). Other alternatives that have reported to work are Wordpad, Dreamweaver (paid), Notepad++, and many more.

Another solution is to use a PHP function, it's also more convenient to convert many files with a PHP functions.

Here is a nice explanation about the UTF-8 BOM and also a PHP function that remove the BOM (I haven't test it): Develobert Blog

Here are links related Notepad2: About Notpad2 Download Notepad2

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