On 2013-04-03 18:26, Norman Clerman wrote: > Can anyone explain the presence of the characters "\xref\xbb\xbf" > before the first field contents "Holdings" ?
(you mean "\xef", not "\xref") This is a byte-order-mark (BOM), which you can read about at [1]. In this case, it denotes the file as UTF-8 encoded. Certain programs insert these, though it's more important with UTF-16 or UTF-32 encodings where the byte-order and endian'ness actually matters. I believe Notepad and Visual Studio on Win32 were both offenders when it came to inserting unbidden BOMs. -tkc [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
