illegal character: \65279

iwax · #1 (**permalink**) 01-30-2008, 03:15 PM

Hello World,

I am using Linux system. I tried to complile a tutorial first application (HelloWorldApp.java) from SunMicrosystems and as a result I got an eror message as indicated in the title line ... quite frustrating...

scuffia · #2 (**permalink**) 01-30-2008, 03:21 PM

...Character 65279 (FEFF in hex) is a byte order mark, apparently inserted
by your editor. For UTF-8, this serves no purpose, and it seems the Java
compiler disallows it completely (as byte order marks are generally not
used in Java)...
[googled it]
So it seems your text editor entered an illegal sequence of characters!

iwax · #3 (**permalink**) 01-30-2008, 03:49 PM

Thanks for the reply!
So, what kind of solution would you recommend? Which text editor would be the right one, not causing this problem?

scuffia · #4 (**permalink**) 01-30-2008, 03:52 PM

Actually I'm not really aware to Linux applications, but a colleague of mine said that "EMax" is a good text editor. Anyway try deleting characters at the beginning and the end of the file, maybe that "bad" character is over there.
I windows I use Eclipse and sometimes, when I'm in a hurry, Context, but I really don't know if there is a linux versione (is very good, simple to use, a lot of highlithers and freeware).