encoding issue

That's a BOM character, which is there because the source code files are saved as UTF-8 BOM. Try to save them as UTF-8 no-BOM (or whatever your editor calls it) or indeed ISO-8859-1 if you must use it (...why would you?).

If you want to use iso-8859-1, you need to save your PHP file as iso-8859-1.
For detailed instructions, please tell us which editor you're using.

However, I highly recommend that you use UTF8 instead.