What's  sign at the beginning of my source file?

Question

I have a PHP source file where  characters automatically got added in! I don\'t know from where they have come. I\'m not getting any parse errors but it results in weird

Answer 1

It's called Byte Order Mark, and doesn't always have to be "". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Some Windows applications add BOM by default. In Notepad++ you can use some options in the Encoding menu like Encode in UTF without BOM or Convert to UTF without BOM.