Did you know that when you call a tag based UDF it generates whitespace? You can control this by simply adding output=false to your cffunction tag. Of course, this also means you can't cfoutput from the UDF, but in general, UDFs should return results, not directly output them.

You do not have this worry with cfscript based UDFs. They can also use writeOutput to directly output from the function, even though they have an implied output=false.