Remove BOM

Remove exactly one U+FEFF from the beginning of already decoded text while preserving identical code points elsewhere.

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ToolBOM Remover
Input
Output
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Preview

How it works

JavaScript position zero is checked for U+FEFF and sliced once when present. Interior U+FEFF and every U+FFFE remain untouched because they are not byte-order signatures after decoding.

  • The Unicode UTF FAQ says a signature can occur only at the start of a data stream and is neither required nor recommended where UTF-8 identification is otherwise known.
  • No encoding is guessed because browser input is already a Unicode string, not the original bytes.

Worked example

Remove UTF-8 BOM
Strip the invisible BOM character from the start of text
Input
											Hello, World!
Output
												Hello, World!

When to use this

CSV imports recover exact first-column headers, JSON parsers see { at position zero, and source-code fixtures compare signed with unsigned decoded text.

Edge cases

  • A leading U+FEFF disappears once, making the following CSV header or JSON opening brace the first character.
  • U+FEFF between left and right is retained because an interior character is not a stream signature.
  • U+FFFE survives instead of being mistaken for a reversed UTF-16 marker after byte decoding has already happened.

References