Re: UTF-8 text files with Byte Order Mark

[Joost]

A BOM is part of the text and it's a (sort of) valid character "ZERO WIDTH NON-BREAKING SPACE". Your best bet is just to strip it off since it's use (aside from providing a BOM) isn't recommended anyway:

while (my $line = <>) {
   $line =~ /^\x{FEFF}//; # strip BOM
   # rest
}