Byte order mark

The byte order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character, U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK, whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: * The byte order, or endianness, of the text stream in the cases of 16-bit and 32-bit encodings; * The fact that the text stream's encoding is Unicode, to a high level of confidence; * Which Unicode character encoding is used.

Byte order mark

The byte order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character, U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK, whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: * The byte order, or endianness, of the text stream in the cases of 16-bit and 32-bit encodings; * The fact that the text stream's encoding is Unicode, to a high level of confidence; * Which Unicode character encoding is used.