"for line in..." results in UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte

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?

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.

The following also worked for me. ISO 8859-1 is going to save a lot, mainly if using Speech Recognition APIs.

Example:

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

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.

Try this to read using Pandas:

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

This works:

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

You could resolve the problem with:

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

'rb' is reading the file in binary mode. Read more here.

You can try this way:

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

Based on another question on Stackoverflow and previous answers in this post, I would like to add a help to find the right encoding.

If your script runs on a Linux OS, you can get the encoding with the file command:

file --mime-encoding <filename>

Here is a python script to do that for you:

import sys
import subprocess

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print("Usage: {} <filename>".format(sys.argv[0]))
    sys.exit(1)

def find_encoding(fname):
    """Find the encoding of a file using file command
    """

    # find fullname of file command
    which_run = subprocess.run(['which', 'file'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    if which_run.returncode != 0:
        print("Unable to find 'file' command ({})".format(which_run.returncode))
        return None

    file_cmd = which_run.stdout.decode().replace('\n', '')

    # run file command to get MIME encoding
    file_run = subprocess.run([file_cmd, '--mime-encoding', fname],
                               stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                               stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    if file_run.returncode != 0:
        print(file_run.stderr.decode(), file=sys.stderr)

    # return  encoding name only
    return file_run.stdout.decode().split()[1]

# test
print("Encoding of {}: {}".format(sys.argv[1], find_encoding(sys.argv[1])))

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

Sometimes when using 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)

Open your file with Notepad++, select "Encoding" or "Encodage" menu to identify or to convert from ANSI to UTF-8 or the ISO 8859-1 code page.

I was using a dataset downloaded from Kaggle while reading this dataset it threw this error:

> UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position > 183: invalid continuation byte

So this is how I fixed it.

import pandas as pd

pd.read_csv('top50.csv', encoding='ISO-8859-1')

So that the web-page is searched faster for the google-request on a similar question (about error with UTF-8), I leave my solvation here for others.

I had problem with .csv file opening with that description:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 150: invalid continuation byte

I opened the file with NotePad & counted 150th position: that was a Cyrillic symbol. I resaved that file with 'Save as..' command with Encoding 'UTF-8' & my program started to work.

The encoding replaced with encoding='ISO-8859-1'

for line in open('u.item', encoding='ISO-8859-1'):

print(line)

Use this, if you are directly loading data from github or kaggle DF=pd.read_csv(file,encoding='ISO-8859-1')