python unicode how to

[Thomas Thomas]

Hi all,

I have a file with special characters such as "£" etc.  I need to read the file into a list as unicode strings..
How can I do this.. I tried codecs 

import codecs
filename='d:/poll/test.XST'
metaHash={}
infile = codecs.open(filename, "r", encoding='utf-16')
text = infile.read().split('\n')
print text

I am getting the error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "c:/DOCUME~1/ADMINI~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/python-1928Lij.py", line 9, in ?
    text = infile.read().split('\n')
  File "C:\Python23\lib\codecs.py", line 380, in read
    return self.reader.read(size)
  File "C:\Python23\lib\encodings\utf_16.py", line 48, in read
    raise UnicodeError,"UTF-16 stream does not start with BOM"
UnicodeError: UTF-16 stream does not start with BOM

also a sample file content will be
string MetaDataPrompt = "Discovery No";

string MetaDataFieldName = "Discovery No";

string MetaDataType = "string";

string MetaDataValue = "£500";

}

3{

string MetaDataPrompt = "comments";

string MetaDataFieldName = "Comments";

string MetaDataType = "string";

string MetaDataValue = "Energy Scope £500";



Thanks

Thomas





-----------------------------------------------------
Thomas Thomas
thomas at mindz-i.co.nz
Phone.  +64 7 855 8478
Fax.      +64 7 855 8871
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20060803/e8ccee7a/attachment.html>