Text file read issues

[Complex_Potential]

Thanks both

snippsat - that worked like a charm, thank you. I'll have to check out chardet. It looks very handy for figuring out encoding.

---

Ok, next question (sorry!)

I've tried to put this data into a list so I can work with it but it looks different in list format to printed format:

datapoints = []
with open("C:\\...\\170825  t05 L11O44S3.txt", encoding ='UTF-16') as f:
    for i in f:
        datapoints.append(i)

print(datapoints)

Output:
['25 August 2017 09:15:00\t23.19\n', '25 August 2017 09:00:00\t22.98\n', '25 August 2017 08:45:00\t22.76\n', '25 August 2017 08:30:00\t22.62\n, ....'

So I tried removing the \, t and n in the list by modifying the code to

datapoints = []
with open("C:\\...\\170825  t05 L11O44S3.txt", encoding ='UTF-16') as f:
    for i in f:
        datapoints.append(i)

for data in datapoints:
    data = data.replace('\\t',' ')
    data = data.replace('\\n','')

print(datapoints)

but this results in exactly the same output as before.

What am I doing wrong?