“for line in…” results in UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte

Question

Here is my code,

for line in open(\'u.item\'):
#read each line

whenever I run this code it gives the following error:

Answer 1

Sometimes when open(filepath) in which filepath actually is not a file would get the same error, so firstly make sure the file you're trying to open exists:

import os
assert os.path.isfile(filepath)

hope this will help.