I can’t find a duplicate of this for Python 3, which handles encodings differently from Python 2. So here’s the answer: instead of opening the file with the default encoding (which is 'utf-8'), use 'utf-8-sig', which expects and strips off the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark, which is what shows up as .
That is, instead of
data = open('info.txt')
Do
data = open('info.txt', encoding='utf-8-sig')
Note that if you’re on Python 2, you should see e.g. Python, Encoding output to UTF-8 and Convert UTF-8 with BOM to UTF-8 with no BOM in Python. You’ll need to do some shenanigans with codecs or with str.decode for this to work right in Python 2. But in Python 3, all you need to do is set the encoding= parameter when you open the file.