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codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE

byte order marks (BOM)

The bytes b'\xff\xfe', the UTF-16 little-endian byte order mark. The same object is available as codecs.BOM_LE.

Syntax

codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE  # b'\xff\xfe'

The 'utf-16-le' codec neither writes nor strips a BOM; it is for protocols where the order is fixed in advance, while 'utf-16' writes a BOM and uses it to detect order when reading. The same two bytes begin BOM_UTF32_LE, so when sniffing a file's encoding, check UTF-32 first and UTF-16 second. codecs.BOM_LE and the legacy BOM32_LE are other names for this very object.

Examples

import codecs
print(codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE, codecs.BOM_LE is codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE)  # → b'\xff\xfe' True
print('hi'.encode('utf-16-le').startswith(codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE))  # → False
print(codecs.BOM_UTF32_LE.startswith(codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE))  # → True

See also

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