Date: 2007Jan12 Keywords: BOM, junk Q. What are those weird binary bytes at the start of my XML file? A. They indicate the encoding of the file. The common encoding are: UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16 Little or Big Endian. Since all most files are UTF-8 this is unnecessary and it may even confuse some programs. More Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark