Unfortunately, when programming, you may get “unicodedecodeerror: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte”. But don’t worry; in this article, we will learn and discuss the solutions to that error. Let’s get started now.

How did the error “unicodedecodeerror: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte” happen?

Maybe when you are using Python-2.6 CGI script got the error in the server log while doing json.dumps().

Traceback (most recent call last):

 File "/etc/mongodb/server/cgi-bin/getstats.py", line 135, in <module>

   print json.dumps(​​__get​data())

 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 231, in dumps

   return _default_encoder.encode(obj)

 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 201, in encode

   chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)

 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode

   return _iterencode(o, 0).

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte

​Here,

__get​data() function returns dictionary {} .

Solution 1: Defining a Different Codec Package

The codec is a computer program that employs compression to cut the size of a huge file or convert between analog and digital audio. Its name combines the terms “code” and “decode.” The audio codec and the video codec are two terms that are frequently used in conjunction with audio and video.

In the read_csv() command, you have selected a different codec pack:

encoding = 'unicode_escape'

You can refer to the example below:

import pandas as pd.

data = pd.read_csv(filename, encoding= 'unicode_escape')

Solution 2: Make use of the encode () function.

The second solution that we want to suggest to you is to use the encode() function.

Syntax:

ENCODE ( expression )

Parameters:

Expression: An expression that yields a value of the form character string. A constant must always be used within quotation marks (” “).

Manipulate the encode() function to encode the string, thereby fixing the error:

a.encode('utf-8').strip()

Solution 3: Use this code

Besides defining a different codec package or using the encode() function, you can also try the code below:

with open(path, 'rb') as f:

 text = f.read()

The problem arises because a non-ASCII character in the dictionary cannot be encoded or decoded. If an is a string containing a non-ASCII character, encode such strings using the encode() method as follows to prevent this error:

file.encode('utf-8').strip()

Solution 4: 

There is a non-ASCII character encoded in your string.

If you had to use other encodings in your code, that could prevent utf-8 from being able to decode the data. Consider this:

>>> 'my weird character \x96'.decode('utf-8')

Traceback (most recent call last):

 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

 File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode

  return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 19: invalid start byte

The encoding in this example is windows-1252; thus, you must:

>>> 'my weird character \x96'.decode('windows-1252')

u'my weird character \u2013.'

Conclusion

Thank you for taking the time to read the article. Hopefully, the method we mentioned above can help you fix the error “unicodedecodeerror: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xa5 in position 0: invalid start byte”. Don’t forget to leave your thoughts and opinions below in the comments section. Good luck!

Read more:

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