Having replaced the normal <?php with <?php namespace foo; on each file in my main source I received the error:
PHP Fatal error: Namespace declaration statement has to be the very first statement in the script in src/admin_house_videos.php on line 1
On a majority of files. Looking around the internet people suggest that something called UTF8-BOM is to blame, but how can I get rid of this?
It turned out, helpfully, that Sublime Text was able to fix this problem on a per-file basis:
File -> Save with Encoding -> UTF8
However on a large repository this would be time consuming. I then found this guide which suggested that the unix tool awk could be used to replace the file:
awk '{if(NR==1)sub(/^\xef\xbb\xbf/,"");print}' file.php
However trying to write this back to the file with > file.php appended to the end blanked the file, presumably some sort of read/write issue with output is sent to stdout.
So a bash script needed to be written to solve the issue; in my case it was run from a root where the files were in ./src/ but change the $dir parameter to alter this. The echo line is just to report on progress.
#!/bin/bash
dir="./src/"
for file in `find $dir -name "*.php"` ; do
echo $file
awk '{if(NR==1)sub(/^\xef\xbb\xbf/,"");print}' $file > $file.awk
mv $file.awk $file
done