Byte Order Marks (BOM)

The so-called Byte Order Mark is a special unicode character that has no visual representation. The point of it, is to start your text data with this pseudocharacter; it serves as a way to identify “Endianness” – that the text is encoded with UTF-16 (Little Endian), or UTF-16 (Big Endian), or UTF-8. Java handles it kinda weirdly; this post describes how it works. The BOM is the bytes: 0xFE 0xFF. That means...