📎 AI Summary:
The forum thread centers on a user encountering files with a consistent prefix of unprintable bytes (EF BB BF), identified as the Byte Order Mark (BOM), which is causing issues in certain files like JSON. A respondent explains that this prefix is the BOM, a common text encoding marker, and provides links for further understanding. The original poster acknowledges this and plans to handle these bytes programmatically, suspecting their appearance may stem from creating files with Notepad, but expresses concern about why it started occurring. Overall, the discussion clarifies the nature of the issue as related to the BOM rather than malware.
PickyBiker

PickyBiker

Senior Member
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May 1, 2016
Messages
11
Thread Author #1
Something is corrupting files on my computer by putting 3 unprintable bytes at the beginning of some files. The characters are unprintable and the hex values are always the same, EF, BB, and BF

There are over two hundred files like this on my system. Most of the affected files have the following extensions: .vb or .js with a few other types as well:
.scad
.h
.pyproj
.sln
.json
.sln

It is the .json file that raised the problem for me. When these characters are in the file, it causes the json file utilities to fail.

I suspect it is a virus but a few different antivirus programs avg, kaspersky, and adaware find nothing.

Ideas?
 

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PickyBiker

PickyBiker

Senior Member
Member details
Joined
May 1, 2016
Messages
11
Thread Author #3
Thank you. At least it's not something bad. I will just detect this and strip them out in my program before I do anything with json files.

Don't know how they suddenly started occurring in json files, but I suspect it was because I was creating them with notepad.
 

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