The alleged codepoints unichr(0xFFFE) and
unichr(0xFFFF) are not unicode characters.  This document:

  http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFFF0.pdf

Contains:

  Noncharacters
  These codes are intended for process internal uses, but
  are not permitted for interchange.

  FFFE !<not a character>
  ¨ the value FFFE !is guaranteed not to be
    a Unicode character at all
  ¨ may be used to detect byte order by
    contrast with FEFF which is a character
    FEFF zero width no-break space

  FFFF !<not a character>
  ¨ the value FFFF !is guaranteed not to be
    a Unicode character at all

In particular, an XML document that contains such an
alleged unicode entity in not well-formed.

All unicode-aware versions of Python threat these
codepoints in the same manner as other codepoints, e.g.
both unichr(0xFFFE) and u'\uffff' pass without complaint.

I believe the correct behavior would be for Python to
raise an exception, or at least a warning, on access to
these spurious characters.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=38388

This is on purpose: you do need a way to write programs
which write and handle BOMs. If you want your program to
raise exceptions for these character points, you can easily
implement the required checks.