htaccess issues

[PCZero]

One of my clients is newly experiencing an ISE on site load.

The error log for this site show this...

[Sun Nov 28 17:49:41.927559 2021] [core:alert] [pid 12619] [client 73.147.96.99:56967] /home/USERNAME/public_html/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfErrorDocument', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration, referer: https://www.myonsitepczero.net/


Even when I upload an empty htaccess I get this.

I am aware of no changes to the site/account in questions.

Using (as always0 notepad0 to edit the htaccess.

Any advice?

 

[quietFinn]

Even when I upload an empty htaccess I get this.

Do you mean you uploaed an empty .htaccess (starting with a dot)?

 

[PCZero]

Yes

 

[quietFinn]

Then I suspect you are uploading the .htaccess to wrong place.

 

[PCZero]

You suspect incorrectly.

 

[cPanelAnthony]

Hello! The following StackOverflow article might help.

Those characters (\xef\xbb\xbf) are the unicode byte order mark for UTF-8 and apache thinks it's garbage characters (on linux at least). In windows, this BOM is used to let Windows know that the file is encoded as UTF-8 instead of whatever default windows text file uses (I think it's UTF-16, little endian). You just need to go use your favorite linux text editor, and delete those characters. Depending on what editor you use, they may not even show up, so you may need to do something like "select from the end of the word RewriteEngine to the beginning of the line, and delete selection, then, from the beginning of the line, just type RewriteEngine by hand.

There's a chance that the htaccess file won't work properly once you move it back to Windows after removing the BOM, I'm not really sure.