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. So it is similar to the coding-header in Python. > >> 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. I hope that's clear now. It says "I'm a UTF-8 file". Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list