Q:

Rails generates unwanted whitespace between partials

I'm developing a Rails application using bootstrap-sass and high_voltage. 
I have a navbar partial in views/application/_navbar.html.erb which I'm rendering in the application.html.erb layout view. This, however, causes a &#65279; to appear between the navbar and the current view, which breaks my layout. This occurs in any view in the application.
Relevant code in application.html.erb:
<body>
  <%= render 'navbar' %>
  <%= yield %>
  <%= render 'footer' %>
</body>

The navbar is just a default Bootstrap 3.3.7 navbar.
I've tried to remove the whitespace between the render calls, as follows:
<body><%= render 'navbar' %><%= yield %><%= render 'footer' %></body>
but to no avail.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Edit: screenshot of the Chrome devtools

A:

The workaround I'm using now is to just strip the space from the page using javascript (jQuery in my case):
$('body').html($('body').html().replace(/\uFEFF/, ''));

