“Content is not allowed in prolog” when parsing perfectly valid XML on GAE

Question

I\'ve been beating my head against this absolutely infuriating bug for the last 48 hours, so I thought I\'d finally throw in the towel and try asking here before I throw my

Answer 1

In the spirit of "just delete all those weird characters before the

    BufferedReader test = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fisTest));
    test.mark(4);
    while (true) {
        int earlyChar = test.read();
        System.out.println(earlyChar);
        if (earlyChar == 60) {
            test.reset();
            break;
        } else {
            test.mark(4);
        }
    }

FWIW, the bytes I was seeing are (in decimal): 239, 187, 191.