Python help needed! Stars screwed me..

[duh]

A year ago I wrote a python script to merge/update my Pokerstars notes on my two computers. This script takes 2 (or more) notes.txt files as input and outputs a single file that contains both sets of notes with no duplicates. Anyway...

Recently Stars changed the format of the Notes.txt files. I am in the process of updating my script, but it seems that Stars is using some kind of different encoding for the text.
I was thinking unicode obv, but I can't get it to print out right.

When I open the notes.txt in notepad, it looks fine. But when the file is read and echoed to the terminal, there is a non alphanumeric character between each legit character. Here is a screenshot:





What am I doing wrong when reading this file?




edit: here is how i'm reading:

inp = open(inputfile, "r")
noteList = inp.read().split("\n")
inp.close()