Thanks! There are indeed three unprintable (in ASCII) bytes before "date" 
in your file (0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf), the first of which is translating to 'i' 
in the gretl CSV reader (since in ISO 8859-1 the byte 0xef represents 
"i-dierisis"). You can see this if you open the file in a hex editor.

Taken together these three bytes actually constitute the so-called byte 
order mark or BOM (permitted but not recommended in UTF-8 files by the 
Unicode standard, and apparently sprinkled around by Microsoft tools). It 
has no business at the start of a plain text file, but I guess we could 
teach gretl just to ignore it.

Allin Cottrell