Byte order mark

Unicode character

The byte-order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character code, U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE, whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text:the byte order, or endianness, of the text stream in the cases of 16-bit and 32-bit encodings; the fact that the text stream's encoding is Unicode, to a high level of confidence; which Unicode character encoding is used.

This keyword could refer to multiple things. Here are some suggestions: