How to compile a java source file which is encoded as "UTF-8"?

Your file is being read as UTF-8, otherwise a character with value "65279" could never appear. javac expects your source code to be in the platform default encoding, according to the javac documentation:

If -encoding is not specified, the platform default converter is used.

Decimal 65279 is hex FEFF, which is the Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM). It's unnecessary in UTF-8, because UTF-8 is always encoded as an octet stream and doesn't have endianness issues.

Notepad likes to stick in BOMs even when they're not necessary, but some programs don't like finding them. As others have pointed out, Notepad is not a very good text editor. Switching to a different text editor will almost certainly solve your problem.

This isn't a problem with your text editor, it's a problem with javac ! The Unicode spec says BOM is optionnal in UTF-8, it doesn't say it's forbidden ! If a BOM can be there, then javac HAS to handle it, but it doesn't. Actually, using the BOM in UTF-8 files IS useful to distinguish an ANSI-coded file from an Unicode-coded file.

The proposed solution of removing the BOM is only a workaround and not the proper solution.

This bug report indicates that this "problem" will never be fixed : https://web.archive.org/web/20160506002035/http://bugs.java.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4508058

Since this thread is in the top 2 google results for the "javac BOM" search, I'm leaving this here for future readers.

Open the file in Notepad++ and select Encoding -> Convert to UTF-8 without BOM.