asp">Unicode Byte Order Mark</a> and if you are swapping your high and low bytes it will look like a FF FE and the person reading your string will know that they have to swap every other byte. Phew. Not every Unicode string in the wild has a byte order mark at the beginning.</p>

<p align="center"><img border="0" alt="" src="/pictures/unicode/hummers.jpg" width="390" height="61" /></p>

<p>For a while it seemed like that might be good enough, but programmers were complaining. "Look at all those zeros!" 