How do I remove  from the beginning of a file?

Three words for you:

Byte Order Mark (BOM)

That's the representation for the UTF-8 BOM in ISO-8859-1. You have to tell your editor to not use BOMs or use a different editor to strip them out.

To automatize the BOM's removal you can use awk as shown in this question.

As another answer says, the best would be for PHP to actually interpret the BOM correctly, for that you can use mb_internal_encoding(), like this:

 <?php   //Storing the previous encoding in case you have some other piece    //of code sensitive to encoding and counting on the default value.         $previous_encoding = mb_internal_encoding();   //Set the encoding to UTF-8, so when reading files it ignores the BOM          mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');   //Process the CSS files...   //Finally, return to the previous encoding   mb_internal_encoding($previous_encoding);   //Rest of the code...  ?>

Open your file in Notepad++. From the Encoding menu, select Convert to UTF-8 without BOM, save the file, replace the old file with this new file. And it will work, damn sure.

In PHP, you can do the following to remove all non characters including the character in question.

$response = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/', '', $response);