invisible characters in parsed XML

[spivey]

I have written a script that parses an XML document and inserts the data into a Drupal website via Drupal's node_save function.

The problem is, every record that is created has an invisible character at the beginning of the title.

Here is the XML parsing script:

$xml=simplexml_load_file('list.xml') or die ('error: cannot find file.');
foreach ( $xml->output_catalog_shelflist as $entry )
{
    if(!db_connect2()) {
        echo "Cannot connect!";
    } 

$target_string1 = $entry->marc->marc_field[1];

$slashpos = strpos($target_string1, '/');
if ( $slashpos !== false )
{
    $string1 = substr($target_string1, 0, $slashpos);
} else {
    $string1 = $target_string1;
}
$title = str_replace(',', '', $string1);

 // Author   

    $target_string2 = $entry->marc->marc_field[0];
    $author = str_replace(',', '', $target_string2);
    $author = str_replace('.', '', $author);

I'm having trouble figuring out how to troubleshoot this. Is there something above that is creating this character and/or how can I strip it out? thanks

spivey