When he says byte-order marks are optional, does he mean just in UTF-8 (where they are) or also in UTF-16 (where I strongly suspect they are not)?
(Yes, you can use heuristics to guess which endianness is in use. The problem is that while this is trivial for Western languages I don't even know how you'd begin when presented with arbitrary text using an East Asian or African written language.)
(Yes, you can use heuristics to guess which endianness is in use. The problem is that while this is trivial for Western languages I don't even know how you'd begin when presented with arbitrary text using an East Asian or African written language.)