Why BOM in logging message?

[Roy Smith]

In article <kcktti$sbg$1 at reader1.panix.com>,
 John Gordon <gordon at panix.com> wrote:

> In <kcksg2$bkp$1 at panix2.panix.com> roy at panix.com (Roy Smith) writes:
> 
> > What's weird is that two of the servers, and only those two, stick a
> > BOM (Byte Order Mark) in front of the message they log.  It shows up
> > in syslog as:
> 
> > 2013-01-09T00:00:00+00:00 web5.songza.com <U+FEFF>2013-01-0900:00:00,754 
> > [18979]: [etc...]
> 
> I worked on an application that would insert a BOM in syslog messages if
> the logged message contained unicode, but not if it was plain ascii.
> 
> Not sure if this relates to your issue, but it's similar enough that it
> seemed worth mentioning.

That doesn't seem to be it.  All messages from web{2,5} have BOMs, no 
message from web{1,3,4,6,7,8,9,10} ever does.

I even tried looking at the output of socket.gethostname() on the 
various machines to see if maybe the hostname had some unicode character 
in it.  No joy.