Removing BOM characters using Java

James Raitsev picture James Raitsev · Feb 19, 2014 · Viewed 42.4k times · Source

What needs to happen to a string using Java to be an equivalent of vis

:set nobomb

Assume that BOM comes from the file I am reading.

Answer

Christian Kuetbach picture Christian Kuetbach · Feb 19, 2014

Java does not handle BOM properly. In fact Java handles a BOM like every other char.

Found this:

http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-handle-utf8-file-with-bom.html

public static final String UTF8_BOM = "\uFEFF";

private static String removeUTF8BOM(String s) {
    if (s.startsWith(UTF8_BOM)) {
        s = s.substring(1);
    }
    return s;
}

May be I would use apache IO instead:

http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/apidocs/org/apache/commons/io/input/BOMInputStream.html