>Can you please expand on your statement that UTF-8 should never have a BOM? >Having one makes it very easy to distinguish a text file that contains UTF-8 >from one that contains text in the system default MBCS encoding. > >You may not be surprised to learn that Microsoft (or, at least, one of its >programmers) does not agree with you. When I save a file from Notepad on >Windows XP in UTF-8, the file contains a BOM.
It seems there are quite a few answers to these questions in the Unicode utf-bom faq http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html including mention of the Microsoft case and the fact that generally a BOM can be used with any UTF.
