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.         


        

Answer 1

This is really just @abarnert's suggestion, but I wanted to post it as an answer since this is the simplest solution and the one that I ended up using:

    file = io.open(filename,'r',encoding='utf-16-le')
    data = np.loadtxt(file,skiprows=8)

This demonstrates how you can create a file object using io.open using whatever crazy encoding your file happens to have, and then pass that file object to np.loadtxt (or np.genfromtxt) for quick-and-easy loading.