Test results: UTF-8 signature

Some user agents produce unexpected results when displaying files that contain a UTF-8 signature (byte order mark). The series of tests for which we are reporting (see right column) results allows you to see whether that holds true for your user agent.

Summary & conclusions

See the results below for user agents tested. This section summarizes the results of those tests.

None of the user agents except Netscape 4 exhibited display problems such as blank lines or spurious characters due to the UTF-8 signature appearing at the top of an XHTML 1.0 file.

None of the user agents exhibited display such problems due to the UTF-8 signature when displaying text using the object element. (Netscape doesn't support that element.)

Of the user agents tested, IE6 and Opera 9.0 added an extra blank line to the beginning of text added to the page using a PHP include where there was a UTF-8 signature at the top of the included file.

This seems to indicate that, on Windows, the most popular browsers cope well these days with the UTF-8 signature, unless it is contained in a PHP include file. The reason for that is not clear.

Results

See the test pages for descriptions of the tests. This page summarizes the results only.

'OK' means that no blank lines or spurious characters were detected. None of the control tests produced unexpected results.

	File	Object	PHP v4.4.4
IE6	OK	OK	Blank line at top of inserted text
Firefox 2.0	OK	OK	OK
Opera 9.0	OK	Ok	Blank line at top of inserted text
Netscape 8.1.2	OK	OK	OK
Netscape 4	Blank line at top of text	Not supported	Blank line at top of inserted text