Disclaimer: I'm not a Python programmer.

I believe the problem is that codecs.BOM_UTF8 is a byte string, not a Unicode string. I suspect the file handler is trying to guess what you really mean based on "I'm meant to be writing Unicode as UTF-8-encoded text, but you've given me a byte string!"

Try writing the Unicode string for the byte order mark (i.e. Unicode U+FEFF) directly, so that the file just encodes that as UTF-8:

import codecsfile = codecs.open("lol", "w", "utf-8")file.write(u'\ufeff')file.close()

(That seems to give the right answer - a file with bytes EF BB BF.)

EDIT: S. Lott's suggestion of using "utf-8-sig" as the encoding is a better one than explicitly writing the BOM yourself, but I'll leave this answer here as it explains what was going wrong before.