Question: How can I detect if a user holds their finger down on an onscreen object for 1 second ?

Thanks,

Martin

Answer: 
It's a [byte order mark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark) (BOM), indicating the response is encoded as [UTF-8](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8). You can safely remove it, but you should parse the remainder as UTF-8.
`$data = str_replace('%EF%BB%BF', '', $data);`

You probably shouldn't be using `stripslashes` -- unless the API returns blackslashed data (and 99.99% chance it doesn't), take that call out.