# Error : not a phred 33 file

**URL:** <https://forum.qiime2.org/t/error-not-a-phred-33-file/3356>\
**Category:** User Support\
**Tags:** pending-development, import, fastq-manifest\
**Created:** [March 8, 2018, 1:38pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/error-not-a-phred-33-file/3356 "2018-03-08T13:38:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![ebolyen](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/ebolyen/32/11_2.png) [@ebolyen](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/ebolyen)\
**Post date:** [March 9, 2018, 4:04pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/error-not-a-phred-33-file/3356/7 "2018-03-09T16:04:30Z")

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Hi @lttnguye!

I've good news! I know what's going on, and it's pretty subtle. Your file contains what is called a [Byte Order Mark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark) at the very beginning (it's completely invisible and meant only for the computer to read). We typically expect files to be encoded as UTF-8 (you may have heard of ASCII, this is the same thing, just more universal). While UTF-8 is ok with a byte order mark it isn't actually useful since there is no byte order in UTF-8 (vs something like UTF-16).

QIIME 2 shouldn't have given you any trouble for having the BOM, so there's definitely something wrong on our end. I'll try and figure out where an issue will go.

In the meanwhile, here's a file with the BOM stripped:

[pe-33-manifest-fixed.csv](https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/flex002/uploads/qiime21/original/2X/5/58f1b9fefe13f6c5be60e52a1052f53a131ca21e.csv) (32.1 KB)

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