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

Because UTF-8 is multibyte and there is no char corresponding to your combination of \xe9 plus following space.

Why should it succeed in both utf-8 and latin-1?

Here how the same sentence should be in utf-8:

>>> o.decode('latin-1').encode("utf-8")
'a test of \xc3\xa9 char'