How to remove %EF%BB%BF in a PHP string
I am trying to use the Microsoft Bing API. $data = file_get_contents("http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V2/Ajax.svc/Speak?appId=APPID&text={$text}&language=ja&format=audio/wav"); $data = stripslashes(trim($data)); The data returned has a ' ' character in the first character of the returned string. It is not a space, because I trimed it before returning the data. The ' ' character turned out to be %EF%BB%BF. I wonder why this happened, maybe a bug from Microsoft? How can I remove this %EF%BB%BF in PHP? You could use substr to only get the rest without the UTF-8 BOM : // if it’s binary UTF-8