“for line in…” results in UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte

Question

Here is my code,

for line in open(\'u.item\'):
#read each line

whenever I run this code it gives the following error:

Answer 1

Sometimes when open(filepath) in which filepath actually is not a file would get the same error, so firstly make sure the file you're trying to open exists:

import os
assert os.path.isfile(filepath)

hope this will help.

Answer 2

If you are using Python 2 the following will the solution:

import io
for line in io.open("u.item", encoding="ISO-8859-1"):
    # do something

Because encoding parameter doesn't work with open(), you will be getting the following error:

TypeError: 'encoding' is an invalid keyword argument for this function

Answer 3

As suggested by Mark Ransom, I found the right encoding for that problem. The encoding was "ISO-8859-1", so replacing open("u.item", encoding="utf-8") with open('u.item', encoding = "ISO-8859-1") will solve the problem.

Answer 4

If someone looking for these, this is an example for converting a CSV file in Python 3:

try:
    inputReader = csv.reader(open(argv[1], encoding='ISO-8859-1'), delimiter=',',quotechar='"')
except IOError:
    pass

Answer 5

Also worked for me, ISO 8859-1 is going to save a lot, hahaha, mainly if using Speech Recognition API's

Example:

file = open('../Resources/' + filename, 'r', encoding="ISO-8859-1");

Answer 6

Try this to read using pandas

pd.read_csv('u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols , encoding='latin-1')