I have a CSS file that looks fine when I open it using gedit, but when it\'s read by PHP (to merge all the CSS files into one), this CSS has the following characters prepend
BOM is just a sequence of characters ($EF $BB $BF for UTF-8), so just remove them using scripts or configure the editor so it's not added.
From Removing BOM from UTF-8:
#!/usr/bin/perl @file=<>; $file[0] =~ s/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//; print(@file);
I am sure it translates to PHP easily.