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

EDIT

Since you posted 2.7 this is the 2.7 solution:

file = open("./Downloads/lamp-post.csv", "r")
data = [line.decode("utf-16", "replace") for line in file]

Ignoring undecodeable characters:

file = open("./Downloads/lamp-post.csv", "r")
data = [line.decode("utf-16", "ignore") for line in file]