TT and UTF8?

[Matt Lawrence]

Joel Bernstein wrote:
> On 29 January 2010 16:59, Matt Lawrence <matt.lawrence at virgin.net> wrote:
>   
>> Joel Bernstein wrote:
>>     
>>> On 29 January 2010 15:25, Dave Hodgkinson <davehodg at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>       
>>>
>> IIRC, you can say ":set bomb" in vim to do this.
>>     
>
> Someone set up us the &^&^!^ytNO CARRIER
>   
I first encountered BOMs when dealing with XML files that had been saved 
as unicode from Notepad. It automatically adds a BOM, but the libxml (or 
was it XML::Parser?) of that time blew up (hur hur) when it encountered 
it. It took a while to discover why, because U+FEFF is a zero-width 
non-breaking space, so anything that understands unicode displays 
absolutely nothing. At least in vim you can set the encoding to 
something else and see the bytes, in notepad the very presence of the 
BOM prevents it from being displayed.

Matt