You should try using the ord($ch) function to find out what the character is. It looks like it might be ASCII character number 1, but it's hard to tell on a webpage. If it is an unprintable ASCII character, you could use the tr operator to delete it: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "\001hello\002world\003lookit\004these\005weird\006charac
+ters";
my $string2 = $string;
# replace ASCII chars from 0 to 8 with spaces
$string =~ tr[\000-\010][         ];

# or delete weird chars:
$string2 =~ tr[\000-\010][]d;
print "string is $string\n";
print "string2 is $string2\n";

__END__

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In reply to Re: Strange character beginning text files by beable
in thread Strange character beginning text files by Anonymous Monk

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