Guido van Rossum wrote: > >... > > I think he meant that this serves as a sort-of "magic number" for > UTF-8 files. I find that kind of cute myself. :-) What he said. Thanks to this trick, notepad and Visual Studio are extremely good at auto-detecting encodings for Unicode text files created with either tool. -- Take a recipe. Leave a recipe. Python Cookbook! http://www.ActiveState.com/pythoncookbook