Edited to emphasize my bone-headedness.
I try to be a good web citizen, and set BBEdit to create UTF-8 encoded files by default.
Last night I created an .htaccess file in BBEdit. Something I’d normally do in emacs.
I saved the file, tried loading a page, and got a server configuration error. The error log read /path/to/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration.
I had forgotten that the file now has a byte-order-mark because I was using my default encoding. Apache barfs on it.
I fixed it by opening it in emacs and removing the byte order mark. I could had, as one reader suggested, just saved it with the right encoding.
