Text Encoding

Here's the file "Hello" in various encodings:

48 65 6C 6C 6F This is the traditional ANSI encoding.

48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00 This is the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with no BOM.

FF FE 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00 This is the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with BOM. The BOM (FF FE) serves two purposes: First, it tags the file as a Unicode document, and second, the order in which the two bytes appear indicate that the file is little-endian.

00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F This is the Unicode (big-endian) encoding with no BOM. Notepad does not support this encoding.

FE FF 00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F This is the Unicode (big-endian) encoding with BOM. Notice that this BOM is in the opposite order from the little-endian BOM.

EF BB BF 48 65 6C 6C 6F This is UTF-8 encoding. The first three bytes are the UTF-8 encoding of the BOM.

2B 2F 76 38 2D 48 65 6C 6C 6F This is UTF-7 encoding. The first five bytes are the UTF-7 encoding of the BOM. Notepad doesn't support this encoding.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx