'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-1: invalid continuation byte code example

Example 1: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x85 in position 715: invalid start byte

import pandas as pd
data = pd.read_csv(filename, encoding= 'unicode_escape')

Example 2: 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 3: 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')

Example 4: 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')