UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 5891: invalid continuation byte 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 0xa5 in position 10: invalid start byte

#use rb over r
with open(path, 'rb') as f:
  text = f.read()