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How to fix that blank bar that all of a sudden appears on top of your website header (remove BOM )

Published on: 02/01/2026, 11:52 PM by Software Developer

As I was deploying another instance of the CMSbyCW on a fourth website, I noticed a blank bar that all of a sudden appears on top of the website header, when clicking the Blog.

I just finished the Landing Page for AGDTechnology.

It was a ONE page that I also worked on for one WEEK.

It was designed to be a noisy webpage.

Anyway, then the site went offline for a bit, then it went back up,and then I noticed these weird codes" upon inspecting the elements in the console.

I know, right?

I didn't program that in there. I guess it gets inserted in transit via FTP?

What is BOM? = Byte Order Mark

BOM is an invisible Unicode character that some editors (especially on Windows) add at the very start of UTF-8 files.

Hex FEFF = BOM

Browsers see it as text, which explains the #text node and the thin “blank bar” at the top.

It also triggers the Quirks Mode warning, because the browser sees content before <!DOCTYPE html>.

Weirdness

Anyway, Here's how I fixed it:

Use this code, put it at the very top of the php file, like so, :

<?php

// Remove BOM if present at the very start of output
ob_start(function($buffer) {
    return preg_replace('/^\x{FEFF}/u', '', $buffer);
});

One thing great with this "light version CMS" is it's easy to upload and easy to see the changes right away.

So I fixed the 3 installations and going on the fourth website.

Of course I will make sure all these codes are inside the ZIP file for the future clients. :-)

Just thought I'd add this here for others to use, in case they need it,

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