How to Resolve UnicodeDecodeError When Iterating Through Text Files?

Troubleshooting UnicodeDecodeError with "for line in..." Iterators

When working with text files, developers often use iterators like "for line in..." to read and process each line of the file. However, sometimes this can lead to a frustrating UnicodeDecodeError.

Problem:

Consider the following code:

<code class="python">for line in open('u.item'):
    # Read each line</code>

When running the above code, you may encounter the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 2892: invalid continuation byte

This error occurs when Python attempts to interpret the bytes in the file using UTF-8 encoding but encounters a byte that doesn't conform to the UTF-8 standard.

Solution:

The solution to this problem lies in determining the correct encoding for the file. In this case, the file is encoded in ISO-8859-1, which is a different character encoding scheme than UTF-8.

To fix the error, specify the encoding when opening the file:

<code class="python">for line in open('u.item', encoding='ISO-8859-1'):
    # Read each line</code>

By replacing the default encoding of 'utf-8' with 'ISO-8859-1', the correct character encoding is used to decode the bytes in the file, resolving the UnicodeDecodeError.

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