python: unicode problem

Question

I am trying to decode a string I took from file:

file = open (\"./Downloads/lamp-post.csv\", \'r\')
data = file.readlines()
data[0]

Answer 1

This looks like UTF-16 data. So try

data[0].rstrip("\n").decode("utf-16")

Edit (for your update): Try to decode the whole file at once, that is

data = open(...).read()
data.decode("utf-16")

The problem is that the line breaks in UTF-16 are "\n\x00", but using readlines() will split at the "\n", leaving the "\x00" character for the next line.