I use Blender 2.56 rev. 34435 in Ubuntu 10.10 amd64.

When I try byte-compilation of Python scripts under scripts/addons/, I always get three errors as follows:

>>> import compileall
>>> compileall.compile_dir(".")
Listing . ...
Compiling ./add_curve_aceous_galore.py ...
*** File "./add_curve_aceous_galore.py", line 1
# ##### BEGIN GPL LICENSE BLOCK #####
^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

Compiling ./add_curve_torus_knots.py ...
Compiling ./add_mesh_3d_function_surface.py ...
Listing ./add_mesh_BoltFactory ...
Compiling ./add_mesh_BoltFactory/createMesh.py ...
*** File "./add_mesh_BoltFactory/createMesh.py", line 1
# ##### BEGIN GPL LICENSE BLOCK #####
^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

Compiling ./add_mesh_BoltFactory/original_script_add_mesh_bolt.py ...
*** File "./add_mesh_BoltFactory/original_script_add_mesh_bolt.py", line 1
# ##### BEGIN GPL LICENSE BLOCK #####
^
SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier
...


I found that these files start with the BOM (0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF) which indicates utf-8 encoding.