Have you met  ? Say hello to my BOM

I recently had to look at a problem where a programmer writing a tool to parse some XML produced by a service written by me was complaining that my service serves invalid XML. All my documents seemed mangled and started with . I couldn’t help but smile. So what is this mysterious sequence ? Well, lets check the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, commonly known as ‘Latin alphabet’ and often confused with the Windows code page 1252: ï is the character corresponding to 0xEF (decimal 239), » is 0xBB (decimal 187) and ¿ is 0xBF (decimal 191). So the mysterious sequence is 0xEFBBBF. Does it look familiar now? It should, this is the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark. Moral: if you consume and parse XML, make sure you consume it as XML, not as text. All XML libraries I know of correctly understand and parse the BOM. The only problems I’ve seen are from hand written ‘parsers’ that treat XML as a string (and most often fail to accommodate namespaces too…).