Git on windows : weird character on first line for C# file

Question

Using http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/detail?name=Git-1.7.3.1-preview20101002.exe&can=2&q= GUI when viewing a c# file I get this:

+using System;
+using System.Collections.Generic;
+using System.Linq;
+using System.Text;

Is + normal characters?

Answer 1

 is what the unicode character U+FEFF encoded as UTF-8 looks like when you "assume" the encoding is actually ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1).

U+FEFF is zero-width non-breaking space but this usage is deprecated and is normally used as a byte-order mark (BOM) in character encoding schemes which have multibyte code units as the byte swapped version: U+FFFE is not a valid unicode character.

As UTF-8 is just a sequence of bytes it makes no sense to have a byte order mark but some tools still use the character as a UTF-8 "signature".

Answer 2

It is the Unicode byte order mark. So the software that is showing you the text is displaying the BOM instead of skipping it.