remove BOM from string read from utf-8 file

[Achim Domma]

Hi,

I read some text from a utf-8 encoded text file like this:

text = codecs.open('example.txt','r','utf8').read()

If I pass this text to a COM object, I can see that there is still the BOM
in the file, which marks the file as utf-8. Simply removing the first
character in the string is not ok, because the BOM is optional. So I tried
something like this:

if text.startswith(codecs.BOM_UTF8):
    print "found BOM"

but then I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)

What's the right way to remove the BOM from the string?

regards,
Achim