<p>This is driving me crazy.</p>

<p>I have this one php file on a test server at work which does not work.. I kept deleting stuff from it till it became </p>

<pre>
&lt;?
print 'Hello';
?>
</pre>

<p>it outputs </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>ï»¿Hello</p>
</blockquote>

<p>if I create a new file and copy / paste the same script to it it works!
Why does this one file give me the strange characters all the time?</p>

[{'answer_id': 12769, 'author': 'Pat', 'author_id': 238, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/238', 'pm_score': 5, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>That\'s the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark" rel="noreferrer">BOM (Byte Order Mark)</a> you are seeing.</p>\n\n<p>In your editor, there should be a way to force saving without BOM which will remove the problem.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 12786, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Found it, file -> encoding -> UTF8 with BOM , changed to to UTF :-)</p>\n\n<p>I should ahve asked before wasing time trying to figure it out :-)</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 86059, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Just in case, here is a list of bytes for BOM </p>\n\n<pre>\nEncoding    Representation (hexadecimal)\nUTF-8   EF BB BF\nUTF-16 (BE) FE FF\nUTF-16 (LE) FF FE\nUTF-32 (BE) 00 00 FE FF\nUTF-32 (LE) FF FE 00 00\nUTF-7   2B 2F 76, and one of the following bytes: [ 38 | 39 | 2B | 2F ]†\nUTF-1   F7 64 4C\nUTF-EBCDIC  DD 73 66 73\nSCSU    0E FE FF\nBOCU-1  FB EE 28 optionally followed by FF†\n</pre>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/12765', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1/']