Solved: Random characters in IRPT

Former Member · ‎2007 Feb 23

I have a simple "hello world" web page.


<html>
    <head>
	<title>Hello Title</title>
    </head>
    <body>
               Hello World
    </body>
</html>

In HTML it displays normally. As an IRPT it issues random characters at the start of the page display ï»¿.

The first line of an IE display of the "source" shows "ï»¿" (the quotes are something I added to delimit the text.

An OD dump of that text is..


0000000     bbef     c3bf     c2af     c2bb     3cbf      7468   6c6d   0d3e
            357 273  277 303  257 302  273 302  277  <    h  t   m   l   >  r

Anyone have an idea where the "random" chars come from, and how to get rid of them?

Former Member · ‎2007 Feb 23

Ryan,

This is odd. I don't think I have seen this before. What editor did you use to create the irpt page?

What if you try putting a DOCTYPE at the beginning of the page like this:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <title>Hello Title</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
        <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
        <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />
        <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
    </head>
    <body>
        Hello World
    </body>
</html>

sufw · ‎2007 Feb 26

Hi Ryan,

it looks like the file was created as UTF-8 encoded as unicode. The "ï»¿" characters represent a unicode byte order mark which is often used to mark files as being encoded in Unicode. (Wikipedia article ) Notepad on later Windows versions can correctly interpret Unicode encoded files, and sice the byte order mark (BOM) is not part of the text content, omits it from the displayed text.

Unicode incapable editors will not understand the BOM and thus display it as string content, which is where the "ï»¿" characters come from. It thus appears that the ServletExec IIS plug-in used to process files with the .irpt file extension does not process unicode files correctly. (ServletExec is not used to render .html files - IIS does this by itself).

This seems surprising since every other part of xMII seems to be Unicode capable... Does anyone have any experience with Unicode irpt files?

Is it possible that the irpt file is not actually Unicode but plain ASCII text? Such a discrepancy could cause problems when the ServletExec processor tries to interpret an ASCII encoded file as Unicode, but it does seem surprising...

Maybe would double-check the file encoding options of Dreamweaver to see if it's outputting UTF-8 or ASCII text... You could also try to remove the first three bytes of the file using a Hex editor and see if that fixes it.

Good luck,

Sascha

Former Member · ‎2007 Feb 23

Yes, this happens on all IRPT pages. In fact, it even happens on a page with 0 content (e.g. a blank page with no HTML).

As far as I know, IRPT have always worked this way at this site (I am the first person to try them here)

We are running Windows Server 2003 R2 service pack 1 (on a virtual machine).

We are running xMII 11.5

I have tried this on another's workstation, running IE and Firefox. The problem occurs in all cases.

Former Member · ‎2007 Feb 23

Thank you for your suggestion. I have tried it, but (sadly) it does not resolve the problem.

The page is developed in DreamWeaver. When I view the original source in Notepad, the random characters do not appear, and it seems that they are an artifact of how the page is being served to the desktop.

If I save the very same page with an ".html", it runs fine, without the random characters.

Random characters in IRPT

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