An unprintable character when inspecting the page in browser

Question

My question is about ASP.NET, VB.NET.

I have a website which is built in ASP.Net and Coding Part is VB.NET.

Now what is the problem - after the menus, to print something including a file and menus are placed inside a master controlled ".acsx" file.

The menu.acsx code is:

...menus links...
    <div>
    <%Response.WriteFile("~/Files/after_header.inc")%>
    </div>

Text written in "after_header.inc" is:

<p>Hello</p>

Now when I inspect the section below the menu and above the "Hello", it is displaying a character like this:

<div>
&#65279;<p>Hello</p>
</div>

My question is: why this character code here? If I remove the code to include the file, then there is no issue.

Can someone help me out - this character is an unprintable character and destroying the website look - it generates an extra line below the menu.

Answer 1

If you convert 65279 to hexadecimal you will find it is FEFF, which is the byte order mark (BOM) for UTF-16.

Writing a file to the page like that isn't really the ASP.NET way of doing things. Instead, you should put a control there:

<asp:Literal ID="someSensibleName" runat="server"></asp:Literal>

and in the code behind, perhaps in the page load event handler, you would populate that control:

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    someSensibleName.Text = IO.File.ReadAllText(Server.MapPath("~/Files/after_header.inc"))

End Sub

The ReadAllText will remove the BOM (if present) for you.