Indeed! That shouldn't happen. Or at the very least, it's inconsistent with UTF-16.

$ perl -le'open $fh, "<:encoding(UTF-16le)", \"\xFF\xFE"; print length
+ <$fh>'
1

$ perl -le'open $fh, "<:encoding(UTF-16)", \"\xFF\xFE"; print length <
+$fh>'
0

$ perl -le'open $fh, "<:encoding(UCS-2le)", \"\xFF\xFE"; print length 
+<$fh>'
1

$ perl -le'open $fh, "<:encoding(UCS-2)", \"\xFF\xFE"; print length <$
+fh>'
UCS-2BE:Unicode character fffe is illegal at -e line 1.
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Using File::BOM or the following would be a better solutions than skipping the first two bytes.

$lines =~ s/\x{FEFF}//g;
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