And of course it should be. But if it’s not possible to move the -sig facility out of the codecs into the streams, that would be a shame. I think we should encourage people to use streams where initialization or finalization semantics are non-trivial, as they are with signatures.

But as long as both utf-8-we-dont-need-no-steenkin-sigs-in-strings and utf-8-sig are available, I can program as I want to (and refer those whose strings get cratered by stray BOMs to you<wink>).—Stephen