Question: Can anyone tell me how to go about building a QR generator? I would like to create custom QR codes for address book entry on mobile phones. Thank you for your help.

Answer: 
EF BB BF is a Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM). Those are actually in your files. That's why Python is seeing it.

Either ignore/discard the BOM or reencode the files to omit it.
That's a UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark). You've probably edited the file with Notepad.