UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xec in position 13: 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 0xe7 in position 5: invalid continuation byte

pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols , encoding='latin-1')