Unprintable special character in RDP file

Question

We're having strange issue. We use RDP files generated in RDP client, we then sign those using rdpsign.exe.
Recently after upgrading our infrastructure from W8/2012 to W8.1/2012R2 we noticed that every RDP file generated in RDC 8.1 client contains a special character on first position that is not visible in normal text editor and is only visible in hex editor.
This character wasn't there in W8/2012. When I create the RDP file manually (typing (copy/pasting) all the options in a text file), it doesn't contain any special character, but when I later sign that file file rdpsign, it adds that character again.
How do we get rid of it? It's preventing our provisioning system from substituting username.

Answer 1

Hello MarkosP,
Thanks for contacting Microsoft.
These bytes are regular UTF-16 byte order marks. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-16
If the tool you use on the RDP file does not support UTF-16, you can try to convert the file to ASCII. This will probably work for most RDP files, except if some
string uses some unicode character not present in the ASCII character set. Here is some info (see the powershell section in the first post/question):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/64860/best-way-to-convert-text-files-between-character-sets​
Best regards,
Sophia Sun
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