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TorgoX (1933)

TorgoX
sburkeNO@SPAMcpan.org
http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/

"Il est beau comme la retractilité des serres des oiseaux rapaces [...] et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie !" -- Lautréamont

Journal of TorgoX (1933)

Wednesday March 13, 2002

03:08 AM

"You dropped a BOM on me, baybay!"

[ #3479 ]

Dear Log,

When write-opening to a Unicode file, it is behoovy to then emit a byte-order mark before anything else:

print OUT "\x{feff}"; # Byte Order Mark

It even works happily with UTF8 files -- many applications correctly interpret as the resulting byte sequence as meaning "YES, THIS IS UTF8!".

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Something fishy (Score:2)

by Matts (1087)

I don't see how that would work on UTF-8 files, since the UTF-8 BOM is 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF (very rarely used since it tends to muck things up somewhat). The ONLY thing 0xFE 0xFF can indicate is network byte order UTF-16.
- Re:Something fishy (Score:1)
  
  by TorgoX (1933)
  
  Note that I have \x{feff} and not \xfe\xff. \x{feff} means "character FEFF", which usually (i.e., until we have more and varied handle disciplines) gets expressed as UTF8.
  > perl -e "print map sprintf(q{%02x },$_), unpack q{C*}, qq{\x{feff}}"
  ef bb bf
  - Re:Something fishy (Score:2)
    
    by Matts (1087)
    
    Ah! You caught me napping. Nice one ;-)
- Re:Something fishy (Score:1)
  
  by TorgoX (1933)
  
  BTW, when does a UTF8 DOM screw things up?
  - Re:Something fishy (Score:2)
    
    by Matts (1087)
    
    Never. But a UTF-8 B.O.M. screws things up ;-). For example on POSIX systems it screws up the shebang line, and also screws up interaction with the file magic type command. This is according to the UTF-8/Unicode on Linux FAQ.
"feff" (Score:2)

by gnat (29)

It sounds like it should be a euphemism for a swearword.
"You feffin' kids take your feffin' skateboards and your feffin' boomboxes somewhere else before I rip your feffin' heads open and take a feffin' coredump in the 0xdeadbeef inside!"
--Nat