“” is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8.

Probably what it means is that you are using a text editor that is saving files in UTF-8 with the BOM, when it should be saving without the BOM. It could be PHP files that have the BOM, in which case they’d appear as literal text on your page.

The Unicode Consortium’s FAQ on the Byte Order Mark is at http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM .

Horrible first post of the year I know but hey Henry suggested I post my bug zappers online and this is something =P.