"Piet van Oostrum" <piet at cs.uu.nl> wrote in message news:wzoerkinig.fsf at Ordesa.local... > Check text[0] and len(text) to verify. That's what I did. The file contains 24 chinese characters and len(text) is 25. And 0xef is the hex code for the BOM if I'm not completely wrong. Achim