Bizarre hidden character in MVC3 Razor loop - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I have a loop
<ul id="news-list" class="thumbobs-list">
#foreach (var item in Model.News) {
#Html.Partial("RenderNews/" + item.TypeString, item)
}
</ul>
that uses partials like this
#model Web.Models.DataModel.NewsItem
#{ Layout = null; }
<li class="news-item #Model.TypeString.ToLower()" id="id-#Model.Id">
<h3 class="headline">
Example News headline.
</h3>
<p class="timestamp">#Model.TimeString</p>
</li>
that works great
but when i went to style with css i encountered a hidden whitespace character that is causing an issue
in front of each partial a space, a U+FEFF, and another space causing issues with the design.
has anyone ever seen this?

Answer 1

You have discovered the BOM, Byte Order Mark. It's stored as the first bytes in text files to indicate the encoding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
[EDIT]
You can open a file with Notepad and "Save As..." as ANSI. This removes the BOM (and the encoding).
// reading a text file as binary will include the BOM flag
FileStream FS = new FileStream(MapPath(#"~\Text\TestUTF8.txt"), FileMode.Open);
byte[] Data = new byte[100];
FS.Read(Data, 0, 100); // BOM is in the data
FS.Close();
// get rid of the BOM
String String1 = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Data);
// reading a text file as text will automatically handle it.
String String2 = File.ReadAllText(MapPath(#"~\Text\TestUTF8.txt"));

Answer 2

Try copying the text out and create a new partial view. Paste it into notepad and rebuild your partial to rule out this character being hidden in your partial or simply load it on the vs binary editor and look for that character. Right click and open with... Then choose binary editor.