First character of the reading from the text file : ï»¿

Question

If I write this code, I get this as output --> This first: ï»¿ and then the other lines

try {
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(
            "myFile.txt"));

    String line;
    while (line = br.readLine() != null) {
        System.out.println(line);
    }
    br.close();

} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

How can I avoid it?

Maybe the BOM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark — Maxime Chéramy, Jul 01 '13 at 13:06
It is the [UTF-8 BOM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark). — Raphaël, Jul 01 '13 at 13:06
I solved so: BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( new FileInputStream("dictionary.txt"),"UTF8")); if (line.startsWith("\uFEFF")) { line = line.substring(1); } — Milton90, Jul 01 '13 at 13:36
That will strip \uFEFF from the beginning of every line, though. I think you only want to strip the one at the beginning of the file. — Nayuki, Jul 01 '13 at 13:41
@Milton90 : this is a good solution.that has helped me .thanks. — Ankur Srivastava, May 11 '17 at 01:08

score 19 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '13 at 13:38

You are getting the characters ï»¿ on the first line because this sequence is the UTF-8 byte order mark (BOM). If a text file begins with a BOM, it's likely it was generated by a Windows program like Notepad.

To solve your problem, we choose to read the file explicitly as UTF-8, instead of whatever default system character encoding (US-ASCII, etc.):

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
    new InputStreamReader(
        new FileInputStream("myFile.txt"),
        "UTF-8"));

Then in UTF-8, the byte sequence ï»¿ decodes to one character, which is U+FEFF. This character is optional - a legal UTF-8 file may or may not begin with it. So we will skip the first character only if it's U+FEFF:

in.mark(1);
if (in.read() != 0xFEFF)
  in.reset();

And now you can continue with the rest of your code.

If I am correct, BOM character would occur only once in the entire file? — Adil, Apr 19 '18 at 15:37
It can occur multiple times if a dumb program concatenated multiple files that each contained a header BOM. — Nayuki, Apr 19 '18 at 15:53

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 01 '13 at 13:08

2

The problem could be in encoding used. try this:

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
      new FileInputStream("yourfile"), "UTF-8"));

edited Jul 01 '13 at 13:08

Joey

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answered Jul 01 '13 at 13:07

Tala

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I'd say it *definitely* is the encoding ;) – Joey Jul 01 '13 at 13:08
2

I've already tried. In place of ï»¿ becomes '?' – Milton90 Jul 01 '13 at 13:09
It could be because of IDE you're using. Sometimes they set the default encoding of native operating system – Tala Jul 01 '13 at 13:13

First character of the reading from the text file : ï»¿

2 Answers2

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