Illegal Character when trying to compile java code

Question

I have a program that allows a user to type java code into a rich text box and then compile it using the java compiler  Whenever I try to compile the code that I have written I get an error that says that I have an illegal character at the beginning of my code that is not there  This is the error the compiler is giving me   C  Users Travis Michael gt   Program Files Java jdk1 6 0 17 bin javac  Test java Test java 1  illegal character   187 n  public class Test    Test java 1  illegal character   191 n  public class Test     2 errors

User · Answer

That s a problem related to BOM  Byte Order Mark  character  Byte Order Mark BOM is an Unicode character used for defining a text file byte order and comes in the start of the file  Eclipse doesn t allow this character at the start of your file  so you must delete it  for this purpose  use a rich text editor like Notepad   and save the file with encoding  UTF-8 without BOM   That should remove the problem   I have copy pasted the some content from a website to a Notepad   editor  it shows the  LS  with black background  Have deleted the  LS  content and  have copy the same content from notepad   to java file  it works fine

User · Answer

I solved this by right clicking in my textEdit program file and selecting  substitutions  and un-checking smart quotes

User · Answer

The BOM is generated by  say  File WriteAllText   or StreamWriter when you don t specify an Encoding   The default is to use the UTF8 encoding and generate a BOM   You can tell the java compiler about this with its -encoding command line option   The path of least resistance is to avoid generating the BOM   Do so by specifying System Text Encoding Default  that will write the file with the characters in the default code page of your operating system and doesn t write a BOM   Use the File WriteAllText String  String  Encoding  overload or the StreamWriter String  Boolean  Encoding  constructor   Just make sure that the file you create doesn t get compiled by a machine in another corner of the world   It will produce mojibake

User · Answer

That s a byte order mark  as everyone says    javac does not understand the BOM  not even when you try something like  javac -encoding UTF8 Test java   You need to strip the BOM or convert your source file to another encoding  Notepad   can convert a single files encoding  I m not aware of a batch utility on the Windows platform for this   The java compiler will assume the file is in your platform default encoding  so if you use this  you don t have to specify the encoding

User · Answer

instead of getting Notepad     You can simply  Open the file with Wordpad  and then  Save As - Plain Text document

User · Answer

If using an IDE  specify the java file encoding  via the properties panel  If NOT using an IDE  use an advanced text-editor  I can recommend Notepad    and set the encoding to  UTF without BOM   or  ANSI   if that suits you

User · Answer

http   en wikipedia org wiki Byte order mark     The byte order mark  BOM  is a Unicode   character used to signal the   endianness  byte order  of a text file   or stream  Its code point is U FEFF    BOM use is optional  and  if used    should appear at the start of the text   stream  Beyond its specific use as a   byte-order indicator  the BOM   character may also indicate which of   the several Unicode representations   the text is encoded in    The BOM is a funky-looking character that you sometimes find at the start of unicode streams  giving a clue what the encoding is  It s usually handles invisibly by the string-handling stuff in Java  so you must have confused it somehow  but without seeing your code  it s hard to see where   You might be able to fix it trivially by manually stripping the BOM from the string before feeding it to javac  It probably qualifies as whitespace  so try calling trim   on the input String  and feeding the output of that to javac

User · Answer

In Android Studio  1  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Select All 2  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Copy    Open new Notepad exe   In Notepad  4  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Paste 5  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Select All 6  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Copy    Back In Android Studio  7  Menu - gt  Edit - gt  Paste

User · Answer

Even I was facing this issue as am using notepad   to code  It is very convenient to type the code in notepad    However after compiling I get an error   error  illegal character    u00bb     Solution   Start writing the code in older version of notepad which will be there by default in your PC  and save it  Later the modifications can be done using notepad    It works

[java] Illegal Character when trying to compile java code

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