Byte order mark
In addition to indicating the byte order, a BOM can also be used as a file signature to identify the encoding of a text file. The UTF-8 file signature (commonly also referred to as a "BOM") identifies the encoding format rather than the byte order of the document. UTF-8 is a linear sequence of bytes (not a sequence of 2-byte or 4-byte units where the byte order is important as in UTF-16 and UTF-32). The following table shows the byte-order marks for various encodings.