How do I remove  from the beginning of a file?

Question

I have a CSS file that looks fine when I open it using gedit, but when it\'s read by PHP (to merge all the CSS files into one), this CSS has the following characters prepend

Answer 1

Same problem, different solution.

One line in the PHP file was printing out XML headers (which use the same begin/end tags as PHP). Looks like the code within these tags set the encoding, and was executed within PHP which resulted in the strange characters. Either way here's the solution:

# Original
$xml_string = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>";

# fixed
$xml_string = "<" . "?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?" . ">";