Strange characters in PHP
That's the BOM (Byte Order Mark) you are seeing.
In your editor, there should be a way to force saving without BOM which will remove the problem.
Just in case, here is a list of bytes for BOM
Encoding Representation (hexadecimal)UTF-8 EF BB BFUTF-16 (BE) FE FFUTF-16 (LE) FF FEUTF-32 (BE) 00 00 FE FFUTF-32 (LE) FF FE 00 00UTF-7 2B 2F 76, and one of the following bytes: [ 38 | 39 | 2B | 2F ]†UTF-1 F7 64 4CUTF-EBCDIC DD 73 66 73SCSU 0E FE FFBOCU-1 FB EE 28 optionally followed by FF†