note Jim <blockquote><i>If it's a UTF-8 file, isn't it meant to have a 3 byte BOM? Your BOM indicates that it's a UTF-16 file, not UTF-8.</i></blockquote> <p>It <i>is</i> a Unicode BOM encoded in three bytes in the UTF-8 character encoding scheme. But it's just <i>one</i> character (<i>one</i> Unicode code point), represented in Perl as <tt>\x{FEFF}</tt> or <tt>\N{BYTE ORDER MARK}</tt>. In a decoded, abstract Unicode string, distinctions between various encodings (serializations) of the string don't exist.</p> <p>Jim</p> 1007942 1008106