“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

Your file doesn't actually contain utf-8 encoded data, it contains some other encoding. Figure out what that encoding is and use it in the open call.

In Windows-1252 encoding for example the 0xe9 would be the character é.

Answer 2

you can try this way:

open('u.item', encoding='utf8', errors='ignore')

Answer 3

You could resolve the problem with:

for line in open(your_file_path, 'rb'):

'rb' is reading file in binary mode. Read more here. Hope this will help!

Answer 4

This works:

open('filename', encoding='latin-1')

or:

open('filename',encoding="ISO-8859-1")