'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x97 in position 22: invalid start byte decode() python 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
text = open(fn, 'rb').read().decode('ISO-8859-1')