unknown encoding problem

[Uwe Mayer]

Hi,

I need to read in a text file which seems to be stored in some unknown
encoding. Opening and reading the files content returns:

>>> f.read()
'\x00 \x00 \x00<\x00l\x00o\x00g\x00E\x00n\x00t\x00r\x00y\x00...

Each character has a \x00 prepended to it. I suspect its some kind of
unicode - how do I get rid of it? 

str.replace('\x00', '') "works" but is not really nice. I don't quite get
the hang of str.encode /str.decode

Any Ideas?
Thanks
Ciao
Uwe