Is the BOM an OS(Win, Nix . . . ) or encoding standard (UTF-8, ASCII . . .) concept?

Is the BOM a Windows characterisitc or a开发者_JAVA百科 characteristic of some encoding method?

I write code in Windows 7 and Linux. I have the option of choosing how I want my code encoded. I want to be able to switch between both OS's with out a headache. I'm somewhat sure I have acesss to all the characters I need using ASCII. What other issues do I need to consider when transferring between OS's. What text encodings are not standard dependent (ASCII vs Unicode vs UT-8) but OS dependent (Linux vs. Windows).

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BOM is a Unicode encoding thing, nothing to do with Windows and/or UNIX specifically.

Probably the most ubiquitous encoding is UTF-8 and this is happily totally compatible with ASCII if you only use the ASCII character set.