Is there a html validator that can point to a mismatches like this?

Question

Occasionally press a hyphen so the first symbol in a html file (php generated) was not a tag start, but a general symbol. Firefox didn't care about it (it was a joomla source), but IE acted like I did something more dangerous: not centered table, misaligned text, looked like a complete mess. I know that there are always things like this, but I wasted a couple of hours to figure out what was going on. Is there a html validator that can point to things like this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Total Validator would flag it with This element is not recognised.

Answer 2

Most validators will do that.

Try the w3c validator. I tried a valid file with a symbol at the start and it flagged it.