It's been a long day and I'm a bit stumped. I'm reading a binary file that contains lots of wide-char strings and I want to dump these out as Python unicode strings. (To unpack the non-string data I'm using the struct module, but I don't how to do the same with the strings.) For example, reading the word "Series": myfile = open("test.lei", "rb") myfile.seek(44) data = myfile.read(12) # data is now 'S\x00e\x00r\x00i\x00e\x00s\x00' How can I encode that raw wide-char data as a Python string? Edit: I'm using Python 2.6