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Hi experts,

When I open text file using text pad, some special characters are displaying at the beginning of the sentence.

ÿþ are displayed at the beginning of the sentence. How can I remove this?

Thanks,
Marc

The contents of your file are telling you that the text in the file is Unicode, that it is encoded in 16-bit (2-byte) units, and that the pairs of bytes are in the order lower then higher (Intel order).

ÿ (y with diaeresis) has the code 0xFF and þ (thorn) has the code 0xFE. Together they constitute the Unicode byte order mark (BOM) (U+FEFF) of a file encoded in UTF-16 (16 bits per character) with little endian byte order. The prgram that produced your file put them there. They are not part of the textual data of the file; they are an indication of how the bytes are to be interpreted as characters.

TextPad should have recognised the data as such and displayed its contents without the BOM. I don't know why it didn't. Perhaps the text isn't really Unicode.

If, when the file is active in TextPad, you open View | Document Properties | Document, what does it say under Code set?

If you open the file in binary mode, does it look as if its encoded as 2 bytes per character?