Minecraft yellow text is showing up with a symbol I can't remove

The symbol I'm having problems with is the one highlighted above in the red circle.

My code is the following:

§eRIP Jeremiah!

§eOverlord of green pricks!

§eI'm a grape!

§eHiro is top dog!

§ePromoted to regional manager!

The file is saved as "splashes.txt" encoded as UTF-8-BOM in Notepad++ This symbol only shows up on the first line Subsequent lines do not have this issue If I move them all down a line then the symbol is still there, just appears on it's own

Can anyone enlighten me to the problem I'm having here?

Solution 1:

For those who need this answer, you need to set the encoding of the txt file to UTF-8 not UTF-8-BOM. This will fix the issue.