Python (nltk) - UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

Question

I'm new to NLTK. I'm getting this error and I've searched around for encoding/decoding and specifically the UnicodeDecodeError but this error seems specific to the NLTK source code.

Here's the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "A:\Python\Projects\Test\main.py", line 2, in <module>
    print(pos_tag(word_tokenize("John's big idea isn't all that bad.")))
  File "A:\Python\Python\lib\site-packages\nltk\tag\__init__.py", line 100, in pos_tag
    tagger = load(_POS_TAGGER)
  File "A:\Python\Python\lib\site-packages\nltk\data.py", line 779, in load
    resource_val = pickle.load(opened_resource)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xcb in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

How do I go around fixing this error?

Here's what causes the error:

from nltk import pos_tag, word_tokenize
print(pos_tag(word_tokenize("John's big idea isn't all that bad.")))

Answer 1

try this... NLTK 3.0.1 with Python 2.7.x

import io
f = io.open(txtFile, 'rU', encoding='utf-8')