– Visual Studio 2008 – Fucked Up Characters In .aspx Files –  – WTF
April 25th, 2008 | Posted by in Random Stuff
Anyone notice that when they compile an application in Visuial Studio 2008 every .aspx page gets these 3 characters at the start of the file: 
WTF is that?
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Those are the marks some Windows applications use to distinguish UTF-8 from ASCII (they are a translation of the U+FEFF byte order marks into UTF-8). I’ve never done anything with VS and aspx, so I don’t know how to get rid of them. Maybe there is a way to tell VS to save things in UTF-8 without the marks (if you still want them to be UTF-8) or to just save them in ASCII (if you don’t care about UTF-8).
If you are curious, Wikipedia has some info about the marks on the page about UTF-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Windows