end of the character the string ending before the end of the character (which can happen in simple string truncation) an overlong encoding a sequence that decodes to an invalid code point Many of the first UTF-8 decoders would decode these, ignoring incorrect bits and accepting overlong results. Carefully crafted invalid UTF-8 could make them either skip or create ASCII characters such as NUL, slash, or quotes. Invalid UTF-8 has been used to bypass security validations in high-profile products including Microsoft's IIS web server and Apache's Tomcat servlet container. states "Implementations of the decoding algorithm MUST protect against decoding invalid sequences." The Unicode Standard requires decoders to "...treat any ill-formed code unit sequence as an error condition. This guarantees that it will neither interpret nor emit an ill-formed code unit sequence." Since RFC 3629 (November 2003), the high and low surrogate halves used by UTF-16 (U+D800 through U+DFFF) and code points not encodable by UTF-16 (those after U+10FFFF) are not legal Unicode values, and their UTF-8 encoding must be treated as an invalid byte sequence. Not decoding unpaired surrogate halves makes it impossible to store invalid UTF-16 (such as Windows filenames or UTF-16 that has been split between the surrogates) as UTF-8, while it is possible with WTF-8. Some implementations of decoders throw exceptions on errors. This has the disadvantage that it can turn what would otherwise be harmless errors (such as a "no such file" error) into a denial of service. For instance early versions of Python 3.0 would exit immediately if the command line or environment variables contained invalid UTF-8. An alternative practice is to replace errors with a replacement character. Since Unicode 6 (October 2010), the standard () has recommended a "best practice" where the error ends as soon as a disallowed byte is encountered. In these decoders is two errors (2 bytes in the first one). This means an error is no more than three bytes long and never contains the start of a valid character, and there are 21,952 different possible errors. The standard also recommends replacing each error with the replacement character "�" (U+FFFD). Byte order mark If the Unicode byte order mark (BOM, U+FEFF) character is at the start of a UTF-8 file, the first three bytes will be , , . The Unicode Standard neither requires nor recommends the use of the BOM for UTF-8, but warns that it may be encountered