Why Does My Python Code Throw a UnicodeDecodeError When Reading Files?

Decoding Error in Python: UnicodeDecodeError when Converting Bytes

A common error encountered in Python when working with strings is the UnicodeDecodeError when attempting to decode bytes using the UTF-8 codec. This error occurs when Python tries to interpret a byte-array as a UTF-8-encoded string and encounters a sequence of bytes that do not conform to UTF-8 rules.

In the specific case referenced in the provided URL, the error was encountered when compiling the "process.py" script from the pix2pix-tensorflow GitHub repository. The script attempted to read and load a file (specifically an image) using the open(). When Python tried to decode the contents of the file as a UTF-8 string, it failed because the byte sequence at the beginning of the file was not allowed in UTF-8 encoding.

The root cause of this error is the mismatch between the actual nature of the file contents and Python's assumption that they are UTF-8-encoded. The original file might be a binary file, such as an image or compressed data, which cannot be reliably decoded as UTF-8.

To resolve this issue, one should explicitly read the file as binary data using the 'rb' mode in the open() function:

<code class="python">with open(path, 'rb') as f:
    contents = f.read()</code>

By using the 'rb' mode, Python will treat the file as binary and will not attempt to decode it. This will prevent the UnicodeDecodeError from occurring.

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