extracting characters

Total Noob question,

I have a txt file.
I have read the file and made a list of its paragraphs
I then ask for individual characters and every second character is “”

for example an item such as

01:00:34:00 01:00:38:03

if I ask for every character I get

{“”, "
", “”, “0”, “”, “1”, “”, “:”, “”, “0”, “”, “0”, “”, “:”, “”, “2”, “”, “0”, “”, “:”, “”, “2”, “”, “0”, “”, " ", “”, “0”, “”, “1”, “”, “:”, “”, “0”, “”, “0”, “”, “:”, “”, “2”, “”, “7”, “”, “:”, “”, “1”, “”, “8”, “”}

Why is every second character “”
?

thanks in advance

Hi lozdog.

It looks as if the text in your file is big-endian UTF-16 Unicode. If you’re using the ‘read’ command to get it, try using the ‘as’ parameter:

set myText to (read myFile as Unicode text)

awesome, thanks!