Some special characters are added in the BizTalk output file

Question

I have put an XML into a receive location using the Microsoft BizTalk default pipeline "XMLReceive" and then use PassThroughTransmit to output the file to a directory.

However, if hex editor to check the output file, I found that there are three special characters  are found at the beginning of the output file.

The ASCII of  is EF BB BF.

Is there any idea why there are 3 control characters are added at the beginning of the output file?

Answer 1

Those characters are the Byte Order Mark which tell the receiving application how to interpret the text stream. They are not junk but are optional.

I recommend you always send the BOM unless the recieving system cannot accept them (which is really their problem ;).

Answer 2

I have googled the solution myself and shared to others.

Removing the BOM from Outgoing BizTalk Files http://mindovermessaging.com/2013/08/06/removing-the-bom-from-outgoing-biztalk-files/

The three special characters are BOM (Byte Order Mark), set the PreserveBOM to false in sendport XMLTransmit pipeline will remove these three characters.