Question

I’m trying to read a file using Python

open('/Desktop/test.csv','rb').read()[1:15]

and I get returned something like:

'\xfeY\x00!\x00B\x00L\x00-\x00 \x00B'

Even though when I open test.csv in a text editor it is in a readable string format. Does anyone know what format this is and how to convert it back to string characters? Thanks!

Answer 1

The file is encoded with UTF-16.

>>> open('/Desktop/test.csv', 'r', encoding='UTF-16').read(7)
'Y!BL- B'

Or, if you’re still using older Python versions,

>>> import codecs
>>> codecs.open('/Desktop/test.csv', 'r', encoding='UTF-16').read(7)
u'Y!BL- B'

Also note that Python uses zero-based indexing, like most other languages (C, Java, C#, JavaScript, etc…)

>>> 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'[1:15]
'bcdefghijklmno' # Omits the 'a', which is at index 0