UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte error

Question

I'm trying to get a response from urllib and decode it to a readable format. The text is in Hebrew and also contains characters like { and /

top page coding is:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

raw string is:

b'\xff\xfe{\x00 \x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00i\x00d\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00"\x001\x004\x000\x004\x008\x003\x000\x000\x006\x004\x006\x009\x006\x00"\x00,\x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00t\x00i\x00t\x00l\x00e\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00"\x00\xe4\x05\xd9\x05\xe7\x05\xd5\x05\xd3\x05 \x00\xd4\x05\xe2\x05\xd5\x05\xe8\x05\xe3\x05 \x00\xd4\x05\xea\x05\xe8\x05\xe2\x05\xd4\x05 \x00\xd1\x05\xde\x05\xe8\x05\xd7\x05\xd1\x05 \x00"\x00,\x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00d\x00a\x00t\x00a\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00[\x00]\x00\r\x00\n\x00}\x00\r\x00\n\x00\r\x00\n\x00'

Now I'm trying to decode it using:

 data = data.decode()

and I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

Answer 1

Your problem is that that is not UTF-8. You have UTF-16 encoded data, decode it as such:

>>> data = b'\xff\xfe{\x00 \x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00i\x00d\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00"\x001\x004\x000\x004\x008\x003\x000\x000\x006\x004\x006\x009\x006\x00"\x00,\x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00t\x00i\x00t\x00l\x00e\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00"\x00\xe4\x05\xd9\x05\xe7\x05\xd5\x05\xd3\x05 \x00\xd4\x05\xe2\x05\xd5\x05\xe8\x05\xe3\x05 \x00\xd4\x05\xea\x05\xe8\x05\xe2\x05\xd4\x05 \x00\xd1\x05\xde\x05\xe8\x05\xd7\x05\xd1\x05 \x00"\x00,\x00\r\x00\n\x00"\x00d\x00a\x00t\x00a\x00"\x00 \x00:\x00 \x00[\x00]\x00\r\x00\n\x00}\x00\r\x00\n\x00\r\x00\n\x00'
>>> data.decode('utf16')
'{ \r\n"id" : "1404830064696",\r\n"title" : "פיקוד העורף התרעה במרחב ",\r\n"data" : []\r\n}\r\n\r\n'
>>> import json
>>> json.loads(data.decode('utf16'))
{'title': 'פיקוד העורף התרעה במרחב ', 'id': '1404830064696', 'data': []}

If you loaded this from a website with urllib.request, the Content-Type header should contain a charset parameter telling you this; if response is the returned urllib.request response object, then use:

codec = response.info().get_content_charset('utf-8')

This defaults to UTF-8 when no charset parameter has been set, which is the appropriate default for JSON data.

Alternatively, use the requests library to load the JSON response, it handles decoding automatically (including UTF-codec autodetection specific to JSON responses).

One further note: the PEP 263 source code codec comment is used only to interpret your source code, including string literals. It has nothing to do with encodings of external sources (files, network data, etc.).