convert string with raw binary data to unicode

[Sjoerd Mullender]

Achim Domma wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to pass raw binary data from a file to a COM object. I read the data
> from file like this:
> 
> data = file('path_to_file','rb').read()
> 
> If passed to a COM object, data is converted to unicode in the way one would
> expect for strings. I.e. a lot of zeros are filled in. I want each two
> characters from data to be interpreted as one unicode character. I read the
> docu about codecs but can not find a suitable codec. I also tried to read
> the data like this:
> 
> data = codecs.open('path_to_file','rb','???').read()
> 
> I tried to use UCS2 for the ???, but this encoding does not exist. A posting
> found via google supposes to use UTF-16 but this is not the same and raises
> an error.
> 
> This shouldn't be a big problem, but I can figure out how to solve it. Can
> anybody help?

Try utf-16-le or utf-16-be (depending on endianness of the data) as 
encoding.


-- 
Sjoerd Mullender <sjoerd at acm.org>