I am trying read_xml() on an xml-format config file, which starts like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"> ..... This file is well-formed and verified by "XML Copy Writer", it can also be open by IE or Filefox with no problem. I am using this code snippet to parse this file: try{ read_xml<wptree>(xmlfile,pt); } catch(xml_parser-error e) { e.what(); } and it throws an exception saying "expected <". By looking into the code I found that, this caused by the fact that the xmlfile starts with a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM)-0xFFFE . "fffe 3c00 3f00 7800 ......" However, read_xml() cannot handle this BOM byte and throws. It's easy to fix it by simply discard the BOM byte, but I wonder whether there is already a flag to enable/disable this that I am unaware of. Can anyone help to clarify? Thanks, tom