UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xba in position 0: invalid start byte site:stackoverflow.com code example

Example 1: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 2892: invalid continuation byte

As suggested by Mark Ransom, I found the right encoding for that problem.
The encoding was "ISO-8859-1", so replacing

open("u.item", encoding="utf-8")
with
open('u.item', encoding = "ISO-8859-1")

will solve the problem.

Example 2: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte invalid start byte

# Use 'ISO-8859-1' instead of "utf-8" for decoding
text = open(fn, 'rb').read().decode('ISO-8859-1')