Why do some XML files start with weird characters?

The extra characters are a Byte Order Mark (BOM), which indicates that the file is encoded in UTF-8. These characters can be safely ignored; simply begin processing the XML at the first < character to obtain the valid XML content.

When downloading XML data over HTTP, the file may appear to contain extra or 'garbage' characters at the beginning of the document. This behavior is typically related to text encoding rather than data corruption.