I wonder about the leading sequence 0xff 0xfe in notepad saved text files - is that some marker indicating the encoding type?

It's called the "byte order mark" (BOM), and is used to detect the little or big-endianness (?) of the data in the file.

See BOM.

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In reply to Re^6: Unicode2ascii by BrowserUk
in thread Unicode2ascii by Haspalm2

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