Python: Load File Contains All Unicode Characters [duplicate]

Question

I have a text file that has the following data:

<miscellaneous text for several lines> User ID Name USERA Test User 1 USERB Test User 2 .... <more miscellaneous text for several lines>

I am trying to pull the user ID and Names out so I can output it into a .csv file. So I imagine the first step would be to load the file and put the contents of the text file into a string

Here is the code I have:

with open('FILE.txt', 'rb') as f: file = f.read() print(file)

but this outputs the following:

Why is it loading in the unicode NULL character? What can I do to fix this?

Also, is there a more efficient way to do this? My plan was to just do regex matches but that is not very efficient

the text file might be encoded in a different encoding. Play around with the encoding keyword in open. — R Nar
– R Nar, Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 17:38
That's regular ASCII zero bytes; they happen to be Unicode zeros, too (and Latin-1 zeros, etc) but that's hardly relevant here. — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 17:44

tripleee · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-01 17:40:43Z

2

Looks like the file uses UTF-16. Use the correct codec and you should be fine.

answered Jun 1, 2016 at 17:40

tripleee

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