UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte X in position Y: character maps to

Question

I\'m trying to get a Python 3 program to do some manipulations with a text file filled with information. However, when trying to read the file I get the following error:

Answer 1

The file in question is not using the CP1252 encoding. It's using another encoding. Which one you have to figure out yourself. Common ones are Latin-1 and UTF-8. Since 0x90 doesn't actually mean anything in Latin-1, UTF-8 (where 0x90 is a continuation byte) is more likely.

You specify the encoding when you open the file:

file = open(filename, encoding="utf8")