What are the strange characters in the XSD downloaded by svcutil.exe

Question

I used svcutil.exe /t:metadata <url-to-xsd> to download an xsd file.

Question: What are strange chatacters in the resulting file as displayed by using the 'type' command from the VS CMD prompt?

Answer 1

Those are the "byte order marks". They identify how the two bytes of the Unicode for the characters are ordered. They're added whenever you write out Unicode data (and will be not displayed if you view the file in Notepad or something else that recognizes Unicode).

Answer 2

Its the byte order mark, it tells the XML parser what character encoding the xml payload is in.