I’ve been using Python scripts to automatically edit and output Windows Resource files (*.rc) for C++ projects in Visual Studio 2013. When handling Unicode, Windows and Visual Studio always want little endian UTF-16 encoding, and the resource file should always start with the Unicode BOM (Byte Order Mark). However, despite the promises in the documentation, I found that Python wasn’t outputting the BOM automatically.

I nearly resorted to outputting it manually, but as is often the case with Python, the correct approach is simpler than it seems. Read more Why Python 3 doesn’t write the Unicode BOM ›