UTF-8 without BOM

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.

Go to File -> Save As. Then on Save button click on triangle and click Save with Encoding.... 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 Visual Studio Code do the following:

From bottom right, select current encoding From options, Select Save with enconding From options, select UTF-8

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.

Even with Dave81's solution, Visual Studio 2015 Community was still reverting my file to UTF8-BOM every single time I save that html file.

When I created that html file, I right-clicked on the project and selected "Add" then added an HTML file.

By default, Visual studio will include a <meta charset="utf-8" /> tag in your HTML file.

Simply removing the tag then applying Dave81's solution made the problem go away for real this time.

It seems the Visual Studio parse your html file and when it sees that tag it converts the file to UTF8-BOM without any consideration to the original file format (UTF-8 without BOM).

I would have made a comment directly under Dave81's solution, but I didn't have enough points to do so...

It is recommended that there is no BOM as standard, but, when using multiple bytes such as [Korean or Chinese], a warning message is displayed when there is no BOM in Visual Studio.

Actually, I created a Korean String array, and the corresponding String array was broken at runtime.

When using Visual Studio, it is recommended to use UTF -8 including BOM according to MS warning message. (when using multi-byte characters)

To perform Advanced Saving on a .csproj file, you must first unload the project by right clicking the project and selecting Unload Project. This will allow you to save the .csproj file with a different encoding.

UTF8Encoding utf8EmitBOM = new UTF8Encoding(false);
StreamWriter  sw = new StreamWriter(Path.Combine(sourcefilePath, fileName), false, utf8EmitBOM);

This code will create file in UTF-8 without BOM