Am 23.02.2012 10:11, schrieb Invisible:
>>> I wonder how widely implemented this undocumented feature is?
>>
>> Most likely more widespread than you think.
>
> I got the distinct impression that this is a Windows-specific
> convention. (Doesn't Linux do something strange with using environment
> variables to define the "system locale"?)

 From the current XML spec:

"Entities encoded in UTF-16 MUST and entities encoded in UTF-8 MAY begin 
with the Byte Order Mark described by Annex H of [ISO/IEC 10646:2000], 
section 16.8 of [Unicode] (the ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE character, 
#xFEFF)."

As for this being supported by editors, there are two possible cases:

(1) The editor treats UTF-8 with a leading BOM as a special encoding; in 
that case, it will strip the BOM from the character stream upon reading, 
and prepend it upon writing, so you're perfectly safe here.

(2) The editor does not expect a leading BOM in UTF-8; in that case, it 
/must/ treat it according to the Unicode standard, which explicitly 
states that the BOM is actually a perfectly valid normal character, 
which just happens to be one of the many space characters, non-breaking 
in this case, with zero width; so you're perfectly safe here as well, 
unless you accidently strip it from the very beginning of the file.

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