Remove “empty” character from String

Question

I\'m using a framwork which returns malformed Strings with \"empty\" characters from time to time.

\"foobar\" for example is represented by: [,f,o,o,b,a,r]

T

Answer 1

A very simple way to remove the UTF-8 BOM from a string, using substring as Denis Tulskiy suggested. No looping needed. Just checks the first character for the mark and skips it if needed.

public static String removeUTF8BOM(String s) {
    if (s.startsWith("\uFEFF")) {
        s = s.substring(1);
    }
    return s;
}

I needed to add this to my code when using the Apache HTTPClient EntityUtil to read from a webserver. The webserver was not sending the blank mark but it was getting pulled in while reading the input stream. Original article can be found here.