These characters  are normally not visible in regular text editors like jEdit or Eclipse etc.
One way to get rid of the characters is to create a new file, press Ctrl A and copy everything from the old file to the new one , and delete the old file - rename the new file, in an editor like jEdit. Or you could view the characters in a Hex Editor and delete them too. If you examine these characters  in a Hexadecimal Editor ----- for example Cygnus Hex Editor -------- they correspond to EF BB BF --- UTF-8 BOM characters http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html , by deleting those three hex characters from the file you essentially delete the special characters. -Rashmi --------------------------------------------------------------------- To start a new topic, e-mail: users@tomcat.apache.org To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]