Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 is nine rules and a few hundred words. They look trivial. They are not — and the Friday-afternoon stories you remember are usually a version string that told the truth in a way someone's parser couldn't handle.
How the UTF-8 BOM (EF BB BF) hides at the start of files and confuses parsers — and the simplest way to strip it without touching the rest of the data.