Python – “for line in…” results in UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte

character encodingpythonpython-3.x

Here is my code,

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

Whenever I run this code it gives the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 2892: invalid continuation byte

I tried to solve this and add an extra parameter in open(). The code looks like:

for line in open('u.item', encoding='utf-8'):
# Read each line

But again it gives the same error. What should I do then?

Best Answer

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.

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