In message <87hbgyosdc....@web.de>, Diez B. Roggisch wrote: > Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > >> 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? > > Let me rephrase: windows editors such as notepad recognize the BOM, and > then assume (hopefully rightfully so) that the rest of the file is text > in utf-8 encoding.
But they can only recognize it as a BOM if they assume UTF-8 encoding to begin with. Otherwise it could be interpreted as some other coding. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
