python - 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 this is what I am receiving
v = o.decode("utf-8")

Which results in:

 Traceback (most recent call last):  
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>  
 File "C:Python27libencodingsutf_8.py",
 line 16, in decode
     return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError:
 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte

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')