Is EF BF BF an allowed character in XML UTF 8
4 If EF BF BF is a typo and you meant EF BB BF Yes if it is the first bytes They are the BOM Byte Order Mark used to identify the endianness of the file For UTF 16 and UTF 32 encoded files this is mandatory For UTF 8 this is optional Some systems might be confused by it if it is present and it might give unexpected behavior if