In message <87d3rorf2f....@web.de>, Diez B. Roggisch wrote: > Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > >> What exactly is the point of a BOM in a UTF-8-encoded file? > > It's a marker like the "coding: utf-8" in python-files. It tells the > software aware of it that the content is UTF-8.
But if the software is aware of it, then why does it need to be told? > Naming it "BOM" is obviously stupid, but that's the way it is called. It is in fact a Unicode BOM character, and I can understand why it’s called that. What I’m trying to understand is why you need to put one in a UTF-8- encoded file. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list