diff --git a/src/prepro/data_builder.py b/src/prepro/data_builder.py
index 31b80af7..7edc33ca 100644
--- a/src/prepro/data_builder.py
+++ b/src/prepro/data_builder.py
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ def load_json(p, lower):
     source = []
     tgt = []
     flag = False
-    for sent in json.load(open(p))['sentences']:
+    for sent in json.load(open(p, encoding ='utf-8-sig'))['sentences']:
         tokens = [t['word'] for t in sent['tokens']]
         if (lower):
             tokens = [t.lower() for t in tokens]
@@ -137,7 +137,7 @@ def _rouge_clean(s):
 def hashhex(s):
     """Returns a heximal formated SHA1 hash of the input string."""
     h = hashlib.sha1()
-    h.update(s.encode('utf-8'))
+    h.update(s.encode('utf-8-sig'))
     return h.hexdigest()