TLDR: File.read(a_file).sub("\xEF\xBB\xBF", "").gsub("\r", "")
I tried using combinations of find/awk/sed, but I ended up corrupting my project files including the git index because I don't understand those commands very well. So instead, I turned to my good old friend ruby. This also has the advantage that I can use it in my program that processes these files. They've been ninja-edited (modfied outside of source control) in the past, which makes it likely that someone will come by and ninja edit them again in the future. But instead of convincing people that it's bad to edit files in notepad or outside of source control, we can just silently fix it on the fly and smile and say "Happy Friday!"
Here is the example of what I'm cleaning up. Thankfully, git's diff viewer is brutally honest and shows these characters. Unfortunately, most editors (including the good ones) simply hide these characters and put them back in when you save the file. The byte order marks were causing browsers to skip CSS declarations
