BOM breaking PHP in Mediawiki code

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NCBuyer
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 7:05 am

BOM breaking PHP in Mediawiki code

Post by NCBuyer »

Greetings,

I just installed Mediawiki on a local network and I have to edit some PHP files. The first one I tried to edit "LocalSettings.php" was saved and when I refreshed the site I received a blank page. Upon seeking answers from Mediawiki's forum, I found this advice:
Most likely, your text editor added a byte order mark (BOM) while you edited MediaWiki's PHP files, but any other content before the opening <?php causes the same problem. This usually happens with LocalSettings.php - but see error message for exact file. Note that BOMs are invisible in most text editors. To remove the BOM, edit the file with something better than Windows Notepad, but if you don't really have time - open the file with it and choose Save as..., then choose "Unicode (UTF-8 Without signature) - Codepage 65001" as file type.
Well I hope that Webuilder is "better than Windows notepad" as the author suggests! :D I bought this editor because I will be needing to edit a lot of this PHP and with my very first edit/save I broke the site due to some characters that I cant even see.

Please tell me that I can save this file such that it doesnt break the website (i.e. remove the BOM). I have tried to save the PHP with encoding "UTF-8 without BOM" but I receive the same blank screen. If I replace the original LocalSettings.php file with the one which came with the install (vanilla version), my site works again.

Any ideas??
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Aivars
Blumentals Software Developer
Posts: 2462
Joined: Thu Aug 22, 2002 1:40 pm
Location: Latvia

Re: BOM breaking PHP in Mediawiki code

Post by Aivars »

UTF8 without BOM is the correct encoding you need to use. Please try again and make sure you have selected it. If this basic feature wouldn't be working then our support would have been drowned in bug reports by now.

Blank page in PHP can also happen if you have syntax error in your PHP script and you have configured PHP to not display error messages but log them.
Blumentals Software Programmer
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NCBuyer
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 7:05 am

Re: BOM breaking PHP in Mediawiki code

Post by NCBuyer »

I took an original copy of the file and restored it. I then saved (no coding changes) the file as UTF8 without BOM and the site stayed up/ok.

I made the required edit given to me by the extension developer and saved it again and the site is blank. So it must be something with the block of code they want me to add.

Thank you for your help and your reply! I will focus on asking my question at their forum now.

-NC
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