UTF-8 With BOM

  • Byte Order Mark
  • The UTF-8 BOM is a sequence of bytes at the start of a text stream (0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF) that allows the reader to more reliably guess a file as being encoded in UTF-8.
  • Normally, the BOM is used to signal the endianness of an encoding, but since endianness is irrelevant to UTF-8, the BOM is unnecessary.
  • According to the Unicode standard, the BOM for UTF-8 files is not recommended: