title: Error tokenizing data. C error: EOF following escape character
body: <p>I'm trying to load a csv text file that I created with an OS X app written in Objective-C (using XCode).  The text file (temp2.csv) looks fine in an editor but there's something wrong with it and I get this error when reading it into a Pandas dataframe.  If I copy the data into a fresh text file (temp.csv) and save that it works fine!  The two text files are clearly different (one is 74 bytes the other is 150) - invisible characters perhaps? - but it's very annoying as I want the python code to load the text files produced by the C code.  Files are attached for reference.</p>
  
  <p>temp.csv</p>
  
  <pre><code>-3.132700,0.355885,9.000000,0.444416
  -3.128256,0.444416,9.000000,0.532507
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>temp2.csv</p>
  
  <pre><code>-3.132700,0.355885,9.000000,0.444416
  -3.128256,0.444416,9.000000,0.532507
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(I can't find any help on this specific error on StackExchange).</p>
  
  <pre><code>Python 2.7.11 |Anaconda 2.2.0 (x86_64)| (default, Dec  6 2015, 18:57:58) 
  [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5577)] on darwin
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.
  Please check out: http://continuum.io/thanks and https://anaconda.org
  &gt;&gt;&gt; import pandas as pd
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df = pd.read_csv("temp2.csv", header=None)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
    File "/Users/billtubbs/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py", line 498, in parser_f
      return _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    File "/Users/billtubbs/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py", line 275, in _read
      parser = TextFileReader(filepath_or_buffer, **kwds)
    File "/Users/billtubbs/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py", line 590, in __init__
      self._make_engine(self.engine)
    File "/Users/billtubbs/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py", line 731, in _make_engine
      self._engine = CParserWrapper(self.f, **self.options)
    File "/Users/billtubbs/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py", line 1103, in __init__
      self._reader = _parser.TextReader(src, **kwds)
    File "pandas/parser.pyx", line 515, in pandas.parser.TextReader.__cinit__ (pandas/parser.c:4948)
    File "pandas/parser.pyx", line 717, in pandas.parser.TextReader._get_header (pandas/parser.c:7496)
    File "pandas/parser.pyx", line 829, in pandas.parser.TextReader._tokenize_rows (pandas/parser.c:8838)
    File "pandas/parser.pyx", line 1833, in pandas.parser.raise_parser_error (pandas/parser.c:22649)
  pandas.parser.CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: EOF following escape character
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df = pd.read_csv("temp.csv", header=None)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df
            0         1  2         3
  0 -3.132700  0.355885  9  0.444416
  1 -3.128256  0.444416  9  0.532507
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Footnote:
  I think I located the problem.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; f = open('temp2.csv')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; contents = f.read()
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print contents
  ??-3.132700,0.355885,9.000000,0.444416
  -3.128256,0.444416,9.000000,0.532507
  &gt;&gt;&gt; contents
  '\xff\xfe-\x003\x00.\x001\x003\x002\x007\x000\x000\x00,\x000\x00.\x003\x005\x005\x008\x008\x005\x00,\x009\x00.\x000\x000\x000\x000\x000\x000\x00,\x000\x00.\x004\x004\x004\x004\x001\x006\x00\n\x00-\x003\x00.\x001\x002\x008\x002\x005\x006\x00,\x000\x00.\x004\x004\x004\x004\x001\x006\x00,\x009\x00.\x000\x000\x000\x000\x000\x000\x00,\x000\x00.\x005\x003\x002\x005\x000\x007\x00'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It's full of escape characters!  How to remove them?</p>