unix file says it is a utf8 encoded file, but not BOM is present.the hex dump is "3C 66 6F 6F 3E C2 80 3C 2F 66 6F 6F 3E"
Gah, I should have read this before replying... well, that does appear to be valid utf-8.... why is it throwing an exception then?
I'm pretty sure that byte stream *is* actually well-formed xml 1.0 and should pass utf validation as well as the XML well-formedness check.
