Mule flow adding weird characters to beginning of file - encoding

Question

I'm simply moving files, but for some reason they are appending weird characters to the front of the file.
Before:
(Encoded with UTF-8)
testCol1,testCol2,testCol3
After: (Encoded with ANSI)
¬í ur [B¬óøTà xp žÌtestCol1,testCol2,testCol3
Things I've tried:
Explicitly setting the encoding to utf-8.
Explicitly setting the encoding to ANSI.
Using a Object to Byte Array with encoding set to utf-8.
Using a Object to String with encoding set to utf-8.
Here is my flow and relevant connectors:
<sftp:connector name="Sftp" maxConnectionPoolSize="3" doc:name="SFTP"/>
<file:connector name="FileConnector" autoDelete="true" streaming="false" validateConnections="true" doc:name="FileConnector"/>
<flow name="SftpOutBound" initialState="stopped">
<file:inbound-endpoint
path="${ftp.base}/${id}/export"
pollingFrequency="${polling.frequency.millis}"
responseTimeout="${standard.response.timeout.millis}"
fileAge="${standard.fileage.delay.millis}"
connector-ref="deletingFileConnector"
doc:name="OutBound">
<file:filename-wildcard-filter pattern="${out.filter}" />
</file:inbound-endpoint>
<object-to-byte-array-transformer doc:name="Object to Byte Array" />
<all doc:name="all">
<file:outbound-endpoint
path="${archive.out}/${id}"
outputPattern="#[header:INBOUND:originalFileName]_#[function:datestamp:${standard.date.format}]_#[function:systime]"
responseTimeout="${standard.response.timeout.millis}"
connector-ref="deletingFileConnector"
doc:name="Archive" />
<logger
level="WARN"
message="Uploaded file from ${ftp.base}/${id}/export/#[header:INBOUND:originalFileName]"
doc:name="Logger"/>
<sftp:outbound-endpoint
connector-ref="Sftp"
host="${host}"
port="${port}"
path="${in.path}"
user="${user}"
identityFile="${configFullPath}/${identity.file}"
passphrase="${passphrase}"
responseTimeout="${standard.response.timeout.millis}"
keepFileOnError="true"
duplicateHandling="overwrite"
exchange-pattern="one-way"
outputPattern="#[header:INBOUND:originalFileName]"
doc:name="SFTP"/>
</all>
</flow>
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

So it seems to be an issue with Mule 3.5.0, when I upgraded to 3.6.1 the issue went away. Still not sure what was causing it, but the version change solved it.

Answer 2

The payload result from file:inbound-endpoint is of type InputStream. Why don't you leave as is (byte[]) to be saved by the file and sftp outbound end-points?
If you have to convert it into a string, then I suggest using <byte-array-to-string-transformer /> after you read it instead of <object-to-byte-array-transformer />