Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with "latin-1" codec? o = "a test of \xe9 char" #I want this to remain a string as this is what I am receiving v = o.decode("utf-8") Which results in: Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte Continue reading...
