there seems to be a different format to these two text files i have. one is generated by automatically by cmd line to text file. when i scp this from a windows machine to a linux machine and i get byte order mark and spacing issues. if i copy to clip board from the windows txt.file and paste it in my linux ide terminal, i get the format i could use with pd.read_fwf. i want to get that format by scping to my linux terminal and not use the ide. i know that there is a byte order mark that shows up in the linux version of the windows text file. this scp’ed version has all kinds of white space problems and the byte order mark also is a problem. it seems there’s a couple options here. one is to convert the format, (seems simplest) other is to remove the byte order mark and remove white space..