UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte

I am using Python-2.6 CGI scripts but found this error in server log while doing json.dumps(),

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/etc/mongodb/server/cgi-bin/getstats.py", line 135, in <module>
    print json.dumps(​​__get​data())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 231, in dumps
    return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 201, in encode
    chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode
    return _iterencode(o, 0)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte

​Here ,

​__get​data() function returns dictionary {} .

Before posting this question I have referred this of question os SO.

UPDATES

Following line is hurting JSON encoder,

now = datetime.datetime.now()
now = datetime.datetime.strftime(now, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ')
print json.dumps({'current_time': now}) # this is the culprit

I got a temporary fix for it

print json.dumps( {'old_time': now.encode('ISO-8859-1').strip() })

But I am not sure is it correct way to do it.

I switched this simply by defining a different codec package in the read_csv() command:

encoding = 'unicode_escape'

Eg:

import pandas as pd
data = pd.read_csv(filename, encoding= 'unicode_escape')

Try the below code snippet:

with open(path, 'rb') as f:
  text = f.read()