Uhm, wow, you're entirely right. I'm not sure how to express how idiotic I feel. I've written working php pages, not dissimilar to this even, before.
So, perhaps more stupidly, uh, why is this happening?
Thanks very much for your assistance in my dumb times.
EDIT:
So I guess the problem was the character encoding Notepad was saving them in.
I changed it from Unicode to ANSI and it worked, the line of PHP did it's job perfectly.
Thanks to everyone who helped, I really appreciate it; and perhaps feel just, very slightly, redeemed in my idiocy for fixing it myself.
You are all basically the best.