Question

Why is  at the start of my file? And how do I remove them?

Answer 1

This is a BOM, or a Byte Order Mark.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

It is the first bytes of a file which can be used to identify the byte order. When encoding the file as ISO-8859-1, the BOM looks like this: .

var diffusedBOM = message.getNode('/');

if (diffusedBOM.indexOf("") == 0) {

   diffusedBOM = diffusedBOM.replaceAll("", "");

}

 

If a string is encoded and then reencoded with a different encoding, the BOM can appear as a different character, like ÿ