Dean Roddey asks
> What is this UTF-8 BOM stuff? I've never heard of such a thing. Given the > form of UTF-8, why would it need a BOM? Its a multi-byte encoding, so there > are no components of it larger than a byte. That was pretty much my first reaction also. Checking with the ICU folks, though, it turns out that UTF-8 allows a BOM, and, if it is found, it should be ignored. It doesn't affect the data that follows in any way, except to confirm that the encoding is really utf-8 and not ascii or latin-1 or whatever. The utf-8 BOM is three bytes, and is nothing more than the UTF-16 BOM character as it appears when encoded as UTF-8. Pretty silly, especially since we already have an encoding declaration to tell us what the encoding is. But it seems that Microsoft is generating utf-8 encoded XML with a BOM, and we need to be able to swallow it. Andy Heninger IBM XML Technology Group, Cupertino, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
