Jonathan Leffler:

You've mis-characterized the problem. UTF-8 doesn't have the quirk -- MS operating systems have the quirk. See: http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM

[Julian] well - the way I read that FAQ BOMs are explicitly mentioned and allowed, which is why we couldn't beat our supplier up over it and had to code around it.

But I think everyone who has so far commented is in agreement that if we use UTF-8 we should "Ban the BOM" (sorry).

Julian

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