INFO: Non-printable characters and…

Neither of those is a bug at all.

The first one is merely an INFO, telling you that you may have unprintable characters in your code. It’s not a blocker of any sort.

The second one is intentional, and it will give you that warning until you remove the unnecessary files. Themes cannot, and should not, contain those hidden files. If you create a ZIP file with the theme, and upload the theme to the directory, then it would reject it because those files were included.

Ok for the hidden files, I’ll check if I can set a filter to the archiver app.

For the info on unprintable characters. I know that it’s just an info… But can you do something about it cause it’s an annoyance. ??

I could check the plugin code for that but I lack the time to do that.

No, the INFO is there intentionally. If it really bugs you, there is a checkbox to suppress INFO messages.

It is there to warn you about a potential problem. Specifically, if you accidentally save your PHP files as “UTF” or “Unicode” in some editors, then those editors may put a Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the top of the file, before the opening <?php piece.

If this happens in the functions.php file, then PHP will happily output it on pages when that file is loaded, and this early output can cause an error where people are unable to log into their WordPress installs because headers (containing cookies) can no longer be sent properly.

Thus, INFO messages are there because they are things you need to know about, but not necessarily “bad”. If you see an INFO that you don’t know about, then that might be a problem. They’re there to make you think about them. ??

I’ve been coding in PHP since 1998, so long enough to know about the problems encountered when files are saved in UTF-8 with BOM. And, by the way, when it happen, I can tel you that it’s very noticeable. Usually, PHP parse the file but send the BOM ahead in a response so we end up with a header already send error message on development settings, so missing it is almost impossible, but probable with careless programmers.

Your plug-in is great! But deceiving in that it doesn’t check for the BOM, it trigger the unprintable character info for ALL characters out of the basic ASCII characters table in comments and in strings.

Look at it this way, WordPress is used in the entire world, WordPress encourage internationalisation, a great plug-in come to help theme developers to make things wright but the plug-in itself doesn’t support internationalisation. And, at the end i’m told to just disable the option, rather than a “It’s worth investigating the mater”….

Hey! English isn’t the sole language in the world! My english isn’t to bat but not good enough for pro work!!! So I do have to create my strings in French and have my PO file translated by someone better than me… And I’m certain that’s the case for almost all non native english speaking developers in the world.

So, until someone comes with a solution in a plug-in of the same type, I wont recommend any of them to colleagues. Sorry.

I didn’t say to disable the option, I said to ignore the message.

As it states in the FAQ, this theme checker is not perfect, and never will be. It is only a tool to help theme authors. It can be wrong, and the messages it gives you may not apply to your circumstances. This isn’t parsing your code and it cannot figure out intent. It can be fooled, or bypassed.

The purpose of theme check is to assist your development through an imperfect attempt to catch things you might have missed, not to solve all the current problems. It will get improvements and become better over time. But it will always give information that may not apply in some cases, and that’s not going to change.