[Tutor] How to read unicode strings from a binary file and display them as plain ascii?

[R. Alan Monroe]

I started writing a program to parse the headers of truetype fonts to
examine their family info. But I can't manage to print out the strings
without the zero bytes in between each character (they display as a
black block labeled 'NUL' in Scite's output pane)

I tried:
     stuff = f.read(nlength)
     stuff = unicode(stuff, 'utf-8')
     print type(stuff), 'stuff', stuff.encode()
        
This prints:

     <type 'unicode'> stuff [NUL]C[NUL]o[NUL]p[NUL]y[NUL]r[NUL]i[NUL]g[NUL]

Apparently I'm missing something simple, but I don't know what.

Alan