It turns out, the answer is that what I’m seeing is a Byte Order Mark, which is a character that tells whatever is loading the document what it is encoded in. In my case, it’s encoded in utf-8, so the corresponding BOM was EF BB BF, as shown below. To remove it, I opened it up in Notepad++ and clicked on “Encode in UTF-8 without BOM”, as shown below:
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To actually see the BOM, I had to open it up in TextPad in Binary mode:, and conducted a Google search for “EF BB BF“.
It took me about 8 hours to find out this was what was causing it, so I thought I’d share this with everyone.
Update: If I had read Joel Spolsky’s blog post: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), then I might not have had this problem.