TextWash

This page finds U+FEFF (byte order mark) anywhere in your text and removes it. The sample below hides one at the start of a JSON document. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Input

X-ray hover a highlight for details

Cleaned output copied ✓

Cleaning rules

What is U+FEFF (byte order mark)?

A marker some editors write at the very start of a UTF-8/UTF-16 file. In UTF-8 it's the three bytes EF BB BF. It's invisible in most editors, and when a tool mishandles the encoding it shows up as the tell-tale mojibake .

Where it comes from

Files saved as "UTF-8 with BOM" (classic Windows Notepad, some IDE defaults), CSV files exported by Excel, and string concatenation that glues whole file contents together — which is how a BOM ends up in the middle of text, where it acts as a deprecated "zero width no-break space".

What it breaks

JSON.parse fails with Unexpected token '\uFEFF'. The first CSV column comes out named \ufeffid instead of id, silently breaking lookups. A BOM before #!/bin/bash stops the shebang from working (cannot execute: required file not found). In PHP it triggers the classic headers already sent error.

How to find it

Check a file with file yourfile (it reports "with BOM") or hexdump -C yourfile | head -1 (look for ef bb bf). Strip it with sed -i '1s/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//' file — or paste the text above and copy the cleaned output.