Yes, this is a byte byte (BOM) character. It drove me crazy. I researched and started reading about the specification and tried to add charset = "UTF-8" to some script tags, but did not go.
I use Dreamweaver and found that when I saved (saved as) some recent html files, the option "Enable Unicode Signature (BOM) was checked. I unchecked and saved and it allowed unwanted characters (I think this saves it without specification )
Updating the charset meta tag for UTF-8 will also allow this and is recommended (which means dozens of pages for me), but I needed this quick fix.
In addition, saving with notepad ++ also does the trick. Here's a related wrt ++ article and wrt BOM settings: notepad ++ converts ansi-encoded file to utf-8
I hope this helps someone!
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