Write text files without Byte Order Mark (BOM)?

Question

In order to omit the byte order mark (BOM), your stream must use an instance of UTF8Encoding other than System.Text.Encoding.UTF8 (which is configured to generate a BOM). There are two easy ways to do this:

1. Explicitly specifying a suitable encoding:

1. Call the UTF8Encoding constructor with False for the encoderShouldEmitUTF8Identifier parameter.

2. Pass the UTF8Encoding instance to the stream constructor.

' VB.NET:
Dim utf8WithoutBom As New System.Text.UTF8Encoding(False)
Using sink As New StreamWriter("Foobar.txt", False, utf8WithoutBom)
    sink.WriteLine("...")
End Using

// C#:
var utf8WithoutBom = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding(false);
using (var sink = new StreamWriter("Foobar.txt", false, utf8WithoutBom))
{
    sink.WriteLine("...");
}

2. Using the default encoding:

If you do not supply an Encoding to StreamWriter's constructor at all, StreamWriter will by default use an UTF8 encoding without BOM, so the following should work just as well:

' VB.NET:
Using sink As New StreamWriter("Foobar.txt")
    sink.WriteLine("...")
End Using

// C#:
using (var sink = new StreamWriter("Foobar.txt"))
{
    sink.WriteLine("...");
}

Finally, note that omitting the BOM is only permissible for UTF-8, not for UTF-16.

Try this:

Encoding outputEnc = new UTF8Encoding(false); // create encoding with no BOM
TextWriter file = new StreamWriter(filePath, false, outputEnc); // open file with encoding
// write data here
file.Close(); // save and close it

Just Simply use the method WriteAllText from System.IO.File.

Please check the sample from File.WriteAllText.

This method uses UTF-8 encoding without a Byte-Order Mark (BOM), so using the GetPreamble method will return an empty byte array. If it is necessary to include a UTF-8 identifier, such as a byte order mark, at the beginning of a file, use the WriteAllText(String, String, Encoding) method overload with UTF8 encoding.

Interesting note with respect to this: strangely, the static "CreateText()" method of the System.IO.File class creates UTF-8 files without BOM.

In general this the source of bugs, but in your case it could have been the simplest workaround :)

If you do not specify an Encoding when creating a new StreamWriter the default Encoding object used is UTF-8 No BOM which is created via new UTF8Encoding(false, true).

So to create a text file without the BOM use of of the constructors that do not require you to provide an encoding:

new StreamWriter(Stream)
new StreamWriter(String)
new StreamWriter(String, Boolean)

I think Roman Nikitin is right. The meaning of the constructor argument is flipped. False means no BOM and true means with BOM.

You get an ANSI encoding because a file without a BOM that does not contain non-ansi characters is exactly the same as an ANSI file. Try some special characters in you "hi there" string and you'll see the ANSI encoding change to without-BOM.