Python - read text file with weird utf-16 format

Question

I'm trying to read a text file into python, but it seems to use some very strange encoding. I try the usual:

file = open('data.txt','r')

lines = file.readlines()

for line in lines[0:1]:
    print line,
    print line.split()

Output:

0.0200197   1.97691e-005

['0\x00.\x000\x002\x000\x000\x001\x009\x007\x00', '\x001\x00.\x009\x007\x006\x009\x001\x00e\x00-\x000\x000\x005\x00']

Printing the line works fine, but after I try to split the line so that I can convert it into a float, it looks crazy. Of course, when I try to convert those strings to floats, this produces an error. Any idea about how I can convert these back into numbers?

I put the sample datafile here if you would like to try to load it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3816350/Posts/data.txt

I would like to simply use numpy.loadtxt or numpy.genfromtxt, but they also do not want to deal with this crazy file.

Answer 1

I'm willing to bet this is a UTF-16-LE file, and you're reading it as whatever your default encoding is.

In UTF-16, each character takes two bytes.* If your characters are all ASCII, this means the UTF-16 encoding looks like the ASCII encoding with an extra '\x00' after each character.

To fix this, just decode the data:

print line.decode('utf-16-le').split()

Or do the same thing at the file level with the io or codecs module:

file = io.open('data.txt','r', encoding='utf-16-le')

---

* This is a bit of an oversimplification: Each BMP character takes two bytes; each non-BMP character is turned into a surrogate pair, with each of the two surrogates taking two bytes. But you probably didn't care about these details.