does TW code ever get "contaminated?

[John Johnson]

sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but does TW documents ever get contaminated by things invisible to the user?

here is why I ask: I have had code I know ought to work and didn't. I compared this to the same exact code in another document, and THAT code worked.

Now suddenly, my formerly "bad" code works right. I opened this document that had been created in Dreamweaver and I am hoping the explanation could be that one or more of these programs is "hanging onto" something invisible to my eye, but which is "breaking" my code.

Thanks for any info on this!

[Thomas Fischer]

Hi John,

sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but does TW documents ever get contaminated by things invisible to the user?

here is why I ask: I have had code I know ought to work and didn't. I compared this to the same exact code in another document, and THAT code worked.

Now suddenly, my formerly "bad" code works right. I opened this document that had been created in Dreamweaver and I am hoping the explanation could be that one or more of these programs is "hanging onto" something invisible to my eye, but which is "breaking" my code.

no and yes.

TextWrangler produces pure text, so there is no contamination as such. But it saves the text in different formats which may create problems for some applications. My experience was with XML files saved with a Byte Order Mark (BOM) which wasn't acceptable to my browser. SInce the BOM doesn't appear in the text you won't see it in a comparison. And since you can open TextWrangler files in different codings, the text you see in TextWrangler might be different from the text your applications "sees" if it assumes another encoding when reading the file.

Hope this helps, best

Thomas