Web server - weird characters generated at the top of page

Question

When first going to a detail page, 4 weird characters appear at the very top of the page. After refreshing the page, these characters disappear.

None of this output is coming from the code itself, and I'm pretty sure that it's a server configuration issue. The closest thing I could find involves HTTP 1.1 chunked encoding. Has anyone experienced this before?

Example characters:

8be2

8e4a

d878

8b50

Reference page: http://fee.org/events/3/

Answer 1

It does look as chunk encoding. As far as I know, it's not an optional feature in HTTP so your user agent must implement it.

Does your server-side code fetch data from external web sites?

Answer 2

I'm guessing your file is saved in Unicode with a Byte Order Mark (BOM)

Open it up in Notepad++ or something similar and save it without a BOM.

What is a byte order mark?

Hope this helps.