Red dot marker BitBucket diff view

Question

We recently migrated our sources from SVN and TFVC to Git. Our code base is mainly constitued of C# and VB.NET files edited in VS2017.

Our Git repos are hosted in BitBucket, but we have an issue with diffs, as you can see bellow, BitBucket displays a small red dot at the begining of our files

On hover, \ufeff is shown in a tooltip, and I know it is a character denoting a zero width non-breaking space (ZWNBSP).

On a personnal side, I host all my source code on GitHub and never had an issue similar to this.

So, what do we risk if we leave this as is ? Which other options do we have ?

Thanks in advance for your help, Roxtar

Answer 1

I had red dots in diffs in bitbucket on xml files coming from VS2017 project.

Red dot represents the Unicode code point U+FEFF (\ufeff) Byte Order Mark (BOM). In my case when I edited a xml UTF-8 file in Visual Studio it added BOM sequence to the beginning of the file.

It is possible to remove BOM (red dot) by resaving a file in Visual Studio without signature. Open file in VS (2017) then File -> Save As. On Save button there is a drop down option 'Save with Encoding'

It defaults to 'Unicode (UTF-8 with signature)'. Change to 'Unicode (UTF-8 without signature')

git diff will see the removal of \ufeff

Answer 2

your file is encoding in UTF-8-BOM open your file with notepad++, change encoding to encode in UTF-8. encode in UTF-8