Re: [bug-gnu-libiconv] Discard BOM on UTF-{16|32]

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> I'm using UTF-16, and I am getting a BOM. Is there a way to suppress
> it?

If you don't want a BOM, then use the encoding name UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE
and transmit that name to the receiver of the converted string. If you
cannot transmit that label "UTF-16LE" or "UTF-16BE" to the receiver, that is,
if the receiver cannot know fore sure whether the string is UTF-16LE or
UTF-16BE, then you MUST transmit a BOM, and the preferred way to do that
is to tell iconv to convert to "UTF-16".

See RFC 2781 for details why this is so.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Ghazala Khan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazala_Khan>