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

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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")

Solution 3:

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.