byte-order mark

See also: byte order mark

English

Noun

byte-order mark (plural byte-order marks)

1. Alternative spelling of byte order mark
   • 2013 January 31, Richard Ishida, “The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML”, in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)‎^[1], archived from the original on 2024:

     To communicate which byte order was in use, U+FEFF (the byte-order mark) was used at the start of the stream as a magic number that is not logically part of the text the stream represents.

   • 2020 July 8, “Byte-order mark”, in Distributed Proofreaders‎^[2], archived from the original on 2024:

     A byte-order mark (BOM) is a special Unicode character.

References

• John Daintith and Edmund Wright, "byte-order mark (BOM)", in A Dictionary of Computing, 6th edition (2008), Oxford University Press, →ISBN: "The Unicode codepoint U+FEFF when occurring at the start of a file. […] The file's content is considered to start at the position following the byte-order mark."