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.
To remove it from the beginning of the string (only):

```
$data = preg_replace('/^%EF%BB%BF/', '', $data);

```