# Garbage characters being put into generate.sql

**URL:** <https://forums.toadworld.com/t/garbage-characters-being-put-into-generate-sql/1700>\
**Category:** Toad Data Modeler\
**Created:** [May 29, 2008, 9:32am UTC](https://forums.toadworld.com/t/garbage-characters-being-put-into-generate-sql/1700 "2008-05-29T09:32:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jeff.lanzarottaintel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/57b2e6/32.png) [@jeff.lanzarottaintel](https://forums.toadworld.com/u/jeff.lanzarottaintel)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2008, 9:32am UTC](https://forums.toadworld.com/t/garbage-characters-being-put-into-generate-sql/1700/1 "2008-05-29T09:32:30Z")

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Hello,

I am having an issue with Toad. When I have it generate the DDL script (generate.sql) the 1st three bytes of the file are garbage characters. They are always  which is Hex (ef bb bf).

Any ideas on why I am getting these strange characters in the file? I found out that Toad was doing be when I attempter to load this .sql file into SQL Server. It complained about invalid character.

Thanks,

Jeff

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**Author:** ![jeff.lanzarottaintel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/57b2e6/32.png) [@jeff.lanzarottaintel](https://forums.toadworld.com/u/jeff.lanzarottaintel)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2008, 10:33am UTC](https://forums.toadworld.com/t/garbage-characters-being-put-into-generate-sql/1700/2 "2008-05-29T10:33:38Z")

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Oh, I am using TDM version 3.1.7.36

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**Author:** ![vladka](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/quest/user_avatar/forums.toadworld.com/vladka/32/41_2.png) [@vladka](https://forums.toadworld.com/u/vladka)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2008, 1:20am UTC](https://forums.toadworld.com/t/garbage-characters-being-put-into-generate-sql/1700/3 "2008-05-30T01:20:52Z")

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Hello Jeff,

The 1st three bytes of the file show in which encoding it is saved - UTF -8 in this case.

Please see:

> **[Byte order mark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark)**
>
> The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character, .mw-parser-output .monospaced{font-family:monospace,monospace}U+FEFF byte order mark (BOM), whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program consuming the text:
> BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise handle the text stream.
> Unicode can be encoded in units of 8-bit, 16...

Feel free to select another encoding for the generated script.  
Select the encoding in the Settings menu | Options | Physical Model | SQL Script area | Encoding Used for SQL Scripts.

Hope this will help.

Regards,

Vladka