utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position

Question

I just found out that my json string contains some special characters such as Pandora®. And I get this error 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position: invalid start byte when i use this:

json.loads(str_to_load)

i have tried this to fix the issue:

json.loads(unicode(str_to_load), "ISO-8859-1")

Apparently, this seems to not working either. How to fix this issue?

The json file is too big to upload here.

Answer 1

You can specify the encoding in json.loads:

json.loads(str_to_load, encoding="ISO-8859-1")