Why doesn't this conversion to utf8 work?

Question

I have a subprocess command that outputs some characters such as \'\\xf1\'. I\'m trying to decode it as utf8 but I get an error.

s = \'\\xf1\'
s.decode(\'utf         


        

Answer 1

It's the first byte of a multi-byte sequence in UTF-8, so it's not valid by itself.

In fact, it's the first byte of a 4 byte sequence.

Bits Last code point Byte 1   Byte 2   Byte 3   Byte 4   Byte 5   Byte 6
21   U+1FFFFF        11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

See here for more info.