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

Question

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