title: Stray Characters in included file
body: <p>Take a look at this image</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/xlCGQ.png" alt="http://cl.ly/3L1v3k1R3M1q2F433q3O"> </p>
  
  <p>The source code in the link is jumbled. Additionally, saving the file as html yields some strange characters above the doctype, seen here </p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/StRUA.png" alt="http://cl.ly/2F2y2Z353M2B2m051Y0b"> </p>
  
  <p>The php header source code begins in the following way: </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"  xml:lang="en"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  ....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Additionally, the header file is included at the top of another file using</p>
  
  <p><code>&lt;?php include ('includes/public_header.php'); ?&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>...which is also the first line in the file. So, my question is, <b>why are there stray characters before the doctype and in what ways can I solve this issue?</b></p>
  
  <p>A little more information: This site (downtowngreensboro.net) is using CodeIgniter and the header and other documents are UTF-8 encoded. </p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Upon further exploration, it appears this issue is limited to CodeIgniter. The blog section (Wordpress) shows clean source code. </p>