As UTF-8 is an 8-bit encoding no BOM is required and any U+FEFF
character in the decoded string (even if it’s the first character) is
treated as a ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.
Without external information it’s impossible to reliably determine
which encoding was used for encoding a string. Each charmap encoding
can decode any random byte sequence. However that’s not possible with
UTF-8, as UTF-8 byte sequences have a structure that doesn’t allow
arbitrary byte sequences. To increase the reliability with which a
UTF-8 encoding can be detected, Microsoft invented a variant of UTF-8
(that Python 2.5 calls "utf-8-sig") for its Notepad program: Before
any of the Unicode characters is written to the file, a UTF-8 encoded
BOM (which looks like this as a byte sequence: 0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf) is
written. As it’s rather improbable that any charmap encoded file
starts with these byte values (which would e.g. map to
LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE
QUOTATION MARK INVERTED QUESTION MARK in iso-8859-1), this increases
the probability that a utf-8-sig encoding can be correctly guessed
from the byte sequence. So here the BOM is not used to be able to
determine the byte order used for generating the byte sequence, but as
a signature that helps in guessing the encoding. On encoding the
utf-8-sig codec will write 0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf as the first three bytes
to the file. On decoding utf-8-sig will skip those three bytes if they
appear as the first three bytes in the file. In UTF-8, the use of the
BOM is discouraged and should generally be avoided.