removing BOM prepended by codecs?

[J. Bagg]

I'm having trouble with the BOM that is now prepended to codecs files. 
The files have to be read by java servlets which expect a clean file 
without any BOM.

Is there a way to stop the BOM being written?

It is seriously messing up my work as the servlets do not expect it to 
be there. I could delete it but that means another delay in retrieving 
the data. My work is a bibliographic system and I'm writing a new search 
engine in Python to replace an ancient one in C.

I'm working on Linux with a locale of en_GB.UTF8

-- 
Dr Janet Bagg
CSAC, Dept of Anthropology,
University of Kent, UK