“EF BB BF” at the beginning of JSON files created in Visual Studio

Question

I have a bunch of JSON files set as Embedded resource in one of my projects. I\'m using Newtonsoft.Json to parse these files:

Answer 1

Change the encoding of the file - when saving there is a little down arrow that lets you go to advanced saving options, including the encoding.

What you are seeing is the BOM (Byte Order Mark) - it indicates this is a Unicode file (UTF-8 in this case, I believe).

You can also just strip it, which should let it parse without issue.

This is something that is best just dealt with once, when saving the file than repeatedly fixing in code.