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?

18 Answers

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]))) 

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') 

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.

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')

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xed in position 7044: invalid continuation byte

The above error is occuring due to encoding

Solution:- Use “encoding='latin-1'”

Reference:-

I keep coming across this error and often the solution is not resolved by encoding='utf-8' but in fact with engine='python' like this:

import pandas as pd file = "c:\\path\\to_my\\file.csv" df = pd.read_csv(file, engine='python') df 

A link to the docs is here: