> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
>
> Tends to get added if you go through a Windows system. Useless for
> utf-8 afaik. Confuse the hell out of you because various tools parse
> and hide them then you pipe the file to a script and everything
> falls over.
>
> Bunch of scripts available here to remove them:
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~mechiel/projects/bomstrip/
Correct. I found the following via Google.
"I created a file utf8.rb with this content: C:\>ruby -e "p
File.read('utf8.rb')" "\357\273\277puts \"Hello World\""
The "\357\273\277" part is the Byte Order Mark for UTF-8, my editor
automatically put it at the beginning of the file, because I saved it
as UTF-8."
At least it isn't some evil virus. Have to do Mr. WorkAround now.
Thank you very much for your help Scott and Richard,
John Gage