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When I try to validate a certain page I get the below error:

Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 136 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication. The error was: utf8 "\xFF" does not map to Unicode

What exactly does this mean and how can I find out what character is causing the problem?

The page is generated dynamically in PHP and a bit large and I am not sure what to look for.

EDIT:

I get missing character symbols for umlauts and french/spanish accented vowels.

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  • At validator.w3.org you can click on "more options" >> "show source"... then you can look at line 136 as the validator sees it and go from there. Commented Jun 14, 2010 at 1:19
  • Can you set the W3C flags so that it shows you the source code or look at it yourself? Otherwise, you try to specify the correct encoding in your HTML - e.g. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>. Commented Jun 14, 2010 at 1:21
  • I tried the 'show source' but it doesn't show the source. 'Sorry! This document can not be checked.' I have set the encoding type in my HTML: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> Commented Jun 14, 2010 at 1:25
  • Well, try UTF-16. Or provide a link to the page so we can take a look ... Commented Jun 14, 2010 at 1:26

2 Answers 2

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Does your text editor save the file with BOM? If so unset that setting and resave it. I think this is it.

Otherwise try going to line 136, possibly with a different editor and delete any weird square symbols, or whole lines.

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2 Comments

Line 194 is extracurricular? (edit: oh maaaan no fair, you corrected it!)
I am using dreamweaver so I am not sure... I tried with BOM off and ON same thing... I seem to get missing character symbols in Chrome for umlaut characters and accented vowels in french/spanish.
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I fixed this with htmlentities() in PHP to make sure the umlaut and accented characters are displayed correctly in html.

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1 Comment

Using HTML entities to display UTF-8 characters in a UTF-8 document is unnecessary.

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