UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x9c

This error occurs when a file or string that is being decoded using the UTF-8 encoding contains an invalid byte sequence. Here's an example of a Python script that could raise this error:

try:
    with open('file.txt', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
        data = f.read()
except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
    print(f'Error decoding file: {e}')

In this example, the script attempts to open and read the contents of a file named "file.txt" using the UTF-8 encoding. If the file contains a byte sequence that is not valid UTF-8, the UnicodeDecodeError will be raised and the error message will be printed.

To resolve this, you can try opening the file in binary mode 'rb' and then decode it using the utf-8 codec

try:
    with open('file.txt', 'rb') as f:
        data = f.read()
        data = data.decode('utf-8', 'ignore')

except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
    print(f'Error decoding file: {e}')

This will ignore any invalid bytes and decode the file using utf-8.