I was writing some commented PHP classes and I stumbled upon a problem. My name (for the @author tag) ends up with a ? (which is a UTF-8 character, ...and a strange name, I know).

Even though I save the file as UTF-8, some friends reported that they see that character totally messed up (È™). This problem goes away by adding the BOM signature. But that thing troubles me a bit, since I don't know that much about it, except from what I saw on Wikipedia and on some other similar questions here on SO.

I know that it adds some things at the beginning of the file, and from what I understood it's not that bad, but I'm concerned because the only problematic scenarios I read about involved PHP files. And since I'm writing PHP classes to share them, being 100% compatible is more important than having my name in the comments.

But I'm trying to understand the implications, should I use it without worrying? or are there cases when it might cause damage? When?

Thanks!