String encoding problem

I have a string that is an output from Windows console that looks like this when I print it or write to file:
" C o n f i g M a n a g e r E r r o r C o d e = 0 ".

I guess it's something with encoding, but I don't know how to fix it. I've tried:

and

but none of those worked.

I have also tried simply to replace spaces with nothing:

...but that didn't work too. I guess this string uses two bytes per character (UTF-16?).

All I need is to get ASCII string to check if it begins with: "ConfigManagerErrorCode=", but none of the options I've tried converts my string to that format, so my comparison doesn't work.

Am I right about root cause (encoding) and what can I do to fix this?

try

print(len(mystring))
for c in mystring:

print(ord(c))

and also try the same stuff after encoding and decoding.
That might reveal a clue to this mystery.

Thanks for your hint, it helped me solve the problem. It showed me that every second byte is 0, and after I removed them from my string, comparing strings worked as expected again.