question about csv.DictReader
Tim Chase
python.list at tim.thechases.com
Wed Apr 3 22:52:26 EDT 2013
On 2013-04-03 18:26, Norman Clerman wrote:
> Can anyone explain the presence of the characters "\xref\xbb\xbf"
> before the first field contents "Holdings" ?
(you mean "\xef", not "\xref")
This is a byte-order-mark (BOM), which you can read about at [1]. In
this case, it denotes the file as UTF-8 encoded. Certain programs
insert these, though it's more important with UTF-16 or UTF-32
encodings where the byte-order and endian'ness actually matters. I
believe Notepad and Visual Studio on Win32 were both offenders when
it came to inserting unbidden BOMs.
-tkc
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
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