Mystery whitespace before calling ->createBlock

Question

I've setup a custom .phtml block that I need to add in various places in a couple of different files. To do this I'm using the following code:

<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('core/template')->setTemplate('page/template/newsletter.phtml')->toHtml(); ?>

For some reason, this seems to be rendering some random Whitespace before the block itself, see attached image.

I'm using Magento 1.9.1

Here are the contents of my custom .phtml file, although from playing with the template calling it I'm pretty sure the whitespace is added in before the block/content!

<div class="newsletter-signup padded-block">
    <h2 class="major">
        <?php echo $this->__('Email Signup') ?>
    </h2>
    <div class="content">
        <div class="newsletter-name">
            <select class="newsletter-title">
                <option value="Mr">Mr</option>
                <option value="Mrs">Mrs</option>
                <option value="Miss">Miss</option>
                <option value="Ms">Ms</option>
                <option value="Dr">Dr</option>
            </select>
            <input type="text" class="newsletter-firstname" placeholder="First Name">
            <input type="text" class="newsletter-lastname" placeholder="Last Name">
        </div>
    </div>
        <input type="text" class="disabled" placeholder="Your name" disabled>
        <input type="email" class="" placeholder="Email address">
</div>

I'm calling this from a Template file with the following code:

        <div class="col-xs-4 col-sm-4 col-md-12 newsletter-block">
            <?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('core/template')->setTemplate('page/template/newsletter.phtml')->toHtml(); ?>
        </div>

Answer 1

You might have a BOM in one of your files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark). If you are using PhpStorm it is pretty easy to remove it.

If you are working in a *nix environment, you can scan your files using this command:

grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF' .

Answer 2

One possibility for whitespace being injected is the use of closing ?> PHP tags in your block classes (see here for more information), so that's worth checking.

You may also want to try adding commenting before you output the block:

<div class="col-xs-4 col-sm-4 col-md-12 newsletter-block"><!--
    --><?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('core/template')->setTemplate('page/template/newsletter.phtml')->toHtml(); ?>
</div>

Or just condense it onto one line:

<div class="col-xs-4 col-sm-4 col-md-12 newsletter-block"><?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('core/template')->setTemplate('page/template/newsletter.phtml')->toHtml(); ?></div>