Hi, If the pasted text is what you see in a text editor, then the text is probably not valid UTF-16. It would look like this in the text display for hex viewer: …<.?.x.m.l..e.n.c.o. etc. A space-like character before each displayed 8 bit character. Aside from that the XML declaration requires version=”…”, so <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-16”?> And this is not valid markup FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466 EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE You might want to look at https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#NT-XMLDecl And if you have software to encode your data as UTF-16BE that might be easier than trying to construct UTF-16 out of bytes, if that is what is shown. Kendall On 10/2/17, 2:24 PM, "basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf of Dave Day" <basex-talk-bounces@mailman.uni-konstanz.de on behalf of David.Day@duke-software.com> wrote: Hello list. Another newbie question. I am creating a file in UTF-16, Big-endian. I am putting a 2 byte BOM sequence of x'FEFF' as the 1st two bytes, followed by a prolog statement identifying this as UTF-16 code. I then ftp this file to my desktop in binary to maintain the encoding. Below is a cut-n-paste of the 1st few bytes as it looks on the mainframe box. --------------------------- Ú.<?xml encoding="UTF-16" ?> FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466 EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE The way the display is within ISPF, each byte has one character on two lines, so the 1st byte, FE should be read as col 1 of both lines, and so forth. When I try to create a new database I get the following from Basex. Command: CREATE DB d100217 :zxpf.ftp.download/apf1.v2r3.xmldata Error: "d100217.xml" (Line 1): Content is not allowed in prolog. Help greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave Day