special characters in front of xml declaration

Hi

I read xml files through mq and placed them on unix by using datastage as tool.

I can see some special characters infront of declaration part for every xml file i have produced.

below is the sample snippet when i opened the file by suing vi editor

^Z^E|^A^Z^Z<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ABC>
<time_st>2011-08-01 12:37:06<time_st>
</ABC>

is there any way i can remove those special characters.

Thanks
dsdev_123

Can you pipe that line through hexdump -C so we can see exactly what it is?

You can't just remove all special characters, or you'll ruin any UTF-8 extended characters, you need to be exact.