Byte Order Mark

From: David Craig (doc@ElSegundoCA.NCR.COM)
Date: Sun Oct 23 1994 - 14:57:23 EDT


We have the following questions related to the Byte Order Mark, value U+FEFF, and
U+FFFE. We are a processing engine of Unicode text streams (not files) and do
not necessarily know the byte-order protocol of the originating client.

1) If the BOM appears, does it have to be the first two bytes in unicode string?

2) Does it indicate that the following bytes need to be swapped or does it
   serve only as a marker telling the receiver if it has been processing
   ordering of unicode bytes properly?

3) Does a Unicode conformant implementation need to place the BOM in text
   streams it originates?

4) Can a conformant implementation ignore these values on input?

5) Does the byte-order continue across text streams and files? What terminates
   a byte-ordering?

6) What does one assume if there is not BOM in the stream?

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