Why am I getting a UnicodeDecodeError: \'utf-8\' codec can\'t decode byte when iterating through a text file?

"for line in..." Results in UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' Codec Can't Decode Byte

When attempting to iterate through lines of a text file using the "for line in open('filename')" syntax, programmers may encounter a UnicodeDecodeError indicating that the 'utf-8' codec can't decode a particular byte. This error typically occurs when the encoding of the text file does not match the encoding assumed by the 'utf-8' codec.

Resolving the Issue

To resolve this error, it is necessary to specify the correct encoding of the text file while opening it. This can be achieved by adding an "encoding=" parameter to the open() function, as seen below:

<code class="python">for line in open('filename', encoding='utf-8'):
    # Read each line</code>

In some cases, the specified encoding may not be correct, leading to the same error. To determine the appropriate encoding, programmers can inspect the text file and identify the character set used.

As an example, the code snippet provided by the questioner:

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

Failed to decode the text file because the encoding was incorrectly assumed to be 'utf-8'. By inspecting the text file, it was found that the correct encoding was "ISO-8859-1". Modifying the code as follows resolved the issue:

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

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