Encoding of measurements exported from photoshop CS4 to read in Python

Question

I exported some measurements (not image files) from Photoshop in CS4. This page describes the tool in CS6 and up, where the measurements nicely export to a csv with utf-8 encoding. In CS4, it exports as a tab-delimited text, and I can't figure out what the encoding is.

Now I want to read the file in Python using pandas or csv. I've tried utf8, ISO-8859-1, US-ASCII, cp1252, and latin1 encoding, all of which give me errors (i.e. invalid start byte, NULL byte, and EOF inside string).

How can I read this file?

Answer 1

I was getting close to posting one of these files here to see if someone could figure it out, but before doing so I opened one in Excel. When I did Save As, Excel defaulted to a utf-16 text file.

I was able to open these files with csv and encoding = utf-16, and with pandas read_table and encoding = utf-16, engine = 'python'. read_csv didn't work.

Seems rather obscure to me, so I'm posting in case this helps someone else.