According to all docs I've found, a BOM is not necessary, and when a BOM is not present then big-endian is supposed. However the string you give seems to be little-endian (as is the case in the problem that got me to this page...). If you s/UTF-16/UTF-16LE/ then your string gets decoded correctly.

In reply to Re^3: decoding a UTF-16B string found in an email subject by Anonymous Monk
in thread decoding a UTF-16B string found in an email subject by neaj

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