PHP, Soap, and WDSL

Hi everyone, I am trying to write a simple php page using an sdk. The SDK api contains all wsdl files which do all the work. There's a soap.php which has all the functions and stores the output in $response. My php page includes soap.php and a function. The function is handled by soap.php and it will get the date from the appropriate wdsl file and store it in $response. It is stored in xml format using utf-16. If I run my php page frmo console, I get the output fine. If I run it from a browser, the page is empty but if I "view source", the date is there.. What do I need to do in my php page to get $response actually displayed in a browser. Thanks Gino