UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 3131: invalid start byte

[oliviaszh]

I did very similar to the code and I replaced the path by
path = '/Users/oliviashi/Documents/software/python/books/'

However I cannot run the file because:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 3131: invalid start byte

What should I do? Thank you very much!

[oliviaszh]

(venv) (Python37) Olivias-MBP:python oliviashi$ python3 /Users/oliviashi/Documents/software/python/DataGenerator.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/oliviashi/Documents/software/python/DataGenerator.py", line 31, in
books.append(load_book(path+book))
File "/Users/oliviashi/Documents/software/python/DataGenerator.py", line 18, in load_book
book = f.read()
File "/Users/oliviashi/Documents/software/python/venv/bin/../lib/python3.7/codecs.py", line 322, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 3131: invalid start byte

[ashupednekar]

same issue here

[atishSanyal03]

just change the line: with open(input_file) as f:
to
with open(input_file, encoding='windows-1252') as f:

[franzvalo1]

or you can:

open(input_file,'rb') as f:
book = f.read().decode(errors='replace')