error UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec ca

Question

https://github.com/affinelayer/pix2pix-tensorflow/tree/master/tools

An error occurred when compiling "process.py" on the above site.

 python tools/process.py --input_dir data --            operation resize --outp
ut_dir data2/resize
data/0.jpg -> data2/resize/0.png

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "tools/process.py", line 235, in <module>
  main()
File "tools/process.py", line 167, in main
  src = load(src_path)
File "tools/process.py", line 113, in load
  contents = open(path).read()
      File"/home/user/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow_2/lib/python3.5/codecs.py", line 321, in decode
  (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode     byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

What is the cause of the error? Python's version is 3.5.2.

Answer 1

Had an issue similar to this, Ended up using UTF-16 to decode. my code is below.

with open(path_to_file,'rb') as f:
    contents = f.read()
contents = contents.rstrip("\n").decode("utf-16")
contents = contents.split("\r\n")

this would take the file contents as an import, but it would return the code in UTF format. from there it would be decoded and seperated by lines.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem.

Solved it by:

import io

with io.open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as fn:
  lines = fn.readlines()

However, I had another problem. Some html files (in my case) were not utf-8, so I received a similar error. When I excluded those html files, everything worked smoothly.

So, except from fixing the code, check also the files you are reading from, maybe there is an incompatibility there indeed.

Answer 3

If possible, open the file in a text editor and try to change the encoding to UTF-8. Otherwise do it programatically at the OS level.

Answer 4

Use encoding format ISO-8859-1 to solve the issue.

Answer 5

It simply means that one chose the wrong encoding to read the file.

On Mac, use file -I file.txt to find the correct encoding. On Linux, use file -i file.txt.

Answer 6

if you are receiving data from a serial port, make sure you are using the right baudrate (and the other configs ) : decoding using (utf-8) but the wrong config will generate the same error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

to check your serial port config on linux use : stty -F /dev/ttyUSBX -a