Wikipedia begs to differ though (check under "UTF-8": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark) Also, at lea

Wikipedia begs to differ though (check under "UTF-8": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark) Also, at least the Rider IDE and VSCode lets you select to save UTF-8 with or without BOM. My guess is that it's used mainly to differentiate between UTF-8 and codepage encoded 8-bit ASCII files (which are still very common on Windows).