Actually, there are two issues here. As @Rex_Mundi said, because PHP removes only what’s between the “<?”/“?>” tags, you might end up with unexpected spacing or newlines.
However, the “” is directly from the included file and probably more familiar in hex as FEFF. If not, have a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
The last can be solved by saving the documents without BOM or by setting the “zend.multibyte” for PHP (I’ve not verified this solution).