ASCII BTL File

[upsonp]

I notice at the top of the from_btl(fname) function that it says:

DataFrame constructor to open Seabird CTD BTL-ASCII format.

But the _read_file(fname) function is actually opening the file with a UTF-8 encoding.

My work around at the moment is to open the BTL file in NotePad++ and convert the ASCII files to UTF-8, but maybe we could pass the file encoding as from_btl(fname, encoding='utf-8'), then _read_file(fname, encoding='utf-8'). Doing so shouldn't change the existing behavior, but will give the option for the developer to set the file encoding if necessary.

Thoughts?

[ocefpaf]

Adding options may be confusing but assuming that all data is UTF-8 is probably worse. Can you check if #145 works for you case?

[upsonp]

This was actually not as big of a deal as I thought. If we allow the user to pass in a StringIO as fname for issue #142, then the user can create their own IO Stream for whatever file type and encoding they're trying to read.

[ocefpaf]

Cool. I'll merge #145 then and close this one so we can focus on the stream input.