Question

I am exporting UTF-8 text from Excel and I want to read and parse the incoming data using Python. I’ve read all the online info so I’ve already tried this, for example:

 txtFile = codecs.open( 'halout.txt', 'r', 'utf-8' )
 for line in txtFile:
  print repr( line )

The error I am getting is:

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: unexpected code byte

Looking at the text file in a Hex editor, the first values are FFFE I’ve also tried:

txtFile.seek( 2 )

right after the ‘open’ but that just causes a different error.

Answer 1

That is a BOM

EDIT, from the coments, it seems to be a utf-16 bom

codecs.open('foo.txt', 'r', 'utf-16')

should work.