UTF-8 without BOM

Question

BOM or Byte Order Mark is sometimes quite annoying. Visual Studio does not change the file unless you save it (as Hans said).

And here is the solution to your problem: If you want to save a file with other encodings, select save as and extend the save button in file dialog and select "Save with encoding". Or if you want to get rid of this setting permanently, just open File menu and select "Advanced save options" and there you should select "UTF-8 without signature" (and that also answered your last question :). Yes "UTF-8 without signature" is same as without BOM.

Now with pictures.

1. Go to File -> Save As.

   

2. Then on Save button click on triangle and click Save with Encoding....

   

3. Click ok to overwrite the file then from list of encodings find UTF-8 Without signature -> Click OK.

   

Hope this saves you some time.

I've created the Fix File Encoding extension that prevents Visual Studio 2010+ from adding BOM to UTF-8 files.

Unfortunately this does not work with csproj files. There is no "Advanced save option" and even though you have set it to "UTF-8 without signature" for a cs file, csproj files still are saved with BOM. If you use VSS it still complains about project files.

UTF-8 - "Save As" (Without Signature) Default - Request to include Default for UTF Without Signature

VS 2017 natively supports EditorConfig so a recommended solution is to add .editorconfig file to your code base and set charset => utf-8. Then once you save a file it will be saved as UTF-8 without BOM.

Recently I found this tiny command-line tool which adds or removes the BOM on arbitary UTF-8 encoded files: UTF BOM Utils (new link at github)

Little drawback, you can download only the plain C++ source code. You have to create the makefile (with CMake, for example) and compile it by yourself, binaries are not provided on this page. However, for a software developer this should not be any issue.

For vs2010 c++, there will be problems with UTF8 without BOM, when source files contain multi-byte characters(eg. Chinese).

Those characters will not be recognized correctly without BOM, and result in failed compling.