problems decrypting ASCII-armored file

[Andrew Gallagher]

>> On 11/30/15 5:41 PM, Andrew Gallagher wrote:
>> That's a Unicode byte order mark. Strictly, it should only be used in
>> UTF-16 documents but in the real world it's commonly used to mark any
>> Unicode file....
> 
> It's a UTF-16BE BOM, you mean.  The UTF-8 BOM is 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF.
> 
> It's a little weird.  You don't see much UTF-16BE out there.

It's the same thing. One is just a different encoding of the other. The OP's software is obviously Unicode-capable as it displayed the unknown character as a U+xxxx code point. The underlying code point is identical no matter which encoding is being used. The only time you would see the raw utf-8 bytes would be if the software was Unicode-incapable or if the locale was set incorrectly, leading it to be interpreted as a sequence of bytes.

Andrew