Adding to my point. Suppose the file consists of a valid json along with the byte order mark like below (the bytes ef, bb and bf represent the byte order mark)

dhruv@AS-MAC-0324 Downloads  % cat zone.json|hexdump -C
00000000  ef bb bf 7b 22 61 22 3a  20 22 61 22 7d 0a        |...{"a": "a"}.|
0000000e

Then a cluster with photon enabled reads the file and gives this as the output.

i.e. the cluster reads the file properly. So, it is a bug in photon enabled environment that it is unable to read an empty file with a byte order mark.