I’ve been using Zapier webhooks in my project for a while now. Everything worked fine initially and I could set up multiple automations without issues. Recently though, I tried setting up a new webhook and it stopped working completely.
Zapier support reached out and told me there’s an issue with the data I’m sending. They said there are weird characters in my JSON payload that shouldn’t be there.
Here’s what they showed me:
\ufeff{"user_id":"456"}
I’m confused because when I test the same endpoint using Postman, everything looks normal and I don’t see any strange characters. Has anyone encountered this before? How can I fix this issue?
Oh man, this is annoying! Had the same weirdness with our Zapier setup a few weeks back. That \ufeff thing is basically invisible in most tools, which makes debugging a nightmare. Try opening your JSON in a hex editor or use cat -v if you’re on Linux - you’ll actually see the BOM then. Quick fix is just adding a trim function before sending data to Zapier.
Same thing happened to me last year - took forever to figure out. It’s definitely that byte order mark at the start of your JSON. Most dev tools hide this character, so you can’t see it in Postman. Mine was coming from a CSV file I was processing - Excel saved it with UTF-8 BOM encoding. You need to handle the encoding when reading the data. For Node.js, strip the BOM with data.replace(/^\ufeff/, '') before sending to Zapier. Python users can open files with encoding='utf-8-sig' to handle it automatically. Check your data source first - if it’s a file upload or import, that’s probably where the BOM came from.
That’s the BOM (Byte Order Mark) character causing your headache. I faced the same issue 6 months ago when our webhook integration broke after working perfectly for ages. The \ufeff is a Unicode BOM that gets inserted at the start of files or data streams, especially with UTF-8 encoding. Postman won’t show it because it handles encoding differently than Zapier’s webhook parser. What fixed it for me was checking how I was generating the JSON. If you’re reading from a file or using certain text editors for your payload, they might be adding the BOM automatically. I had to strip it out in my code before sending the webhook. Also, check if you recently changed anything in your data processing pipeline or switched text editors - that’s usually when this character sneaks in.