UnicodeDecodeError, invalid continuation byte

Question

Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with "latin-1" codec?

o = "a test of \\xe9 char" #I want this to remain a string as thi         


        

Answer 1

I had the same error when I tried to open a CSV file by pandas.read_csv method.

The solution was change the encoding to latin-1:

pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols , encoding='latin-1')