Cannot load movie_lines.txt - 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xad in position 3767: invalid start byte

[alucard001]

Dear Luka

Thanks for this repository. I am currently learning from it and I found the following error from the very beginning of loading the dataset:

sentences = {}
with open('cornell movie-dialogs corpus/movie_lines.txt', 'r') as f:
    for line in f.readlines():
        sentences[line.split(' +++$+++ ')[0]] = line.split(' +++$+++ ')[-1].replace('\n', "")

And the error is this:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-35-66409f9e14a9> in <module>()
      1 sentences = {}
      2 with open('cornell movie-dialogs corpus/movie_lines.txt', 'r') as f:
----> 3     for line in f.readlines():
      4         sentences[line.split(' +++$+++ ')[0]] = line.split(' +++$+++ ')[-1].replace('\n', "")

//anaconda/envs/tensorflow/lib/python3.5/codecs.py in decode(self, input, final)
    319         # decode input (taking the buffer into account)
    320         data = self.buffer + input
--> 321         (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
    322         # keep undecoded input until the next call
    323         self.buffer = data[consumed:]

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xad in position 3767: invalid start byte

Even if I download directly these text files from your repo: movie_answers_2.txt and movie_questions_2.txt, it shows same error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-38-ae6b005fad2b> in <module>()
      4 with open('movie_questions_2.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
      5 
----> 6     lines = f.readlines()
      7 
      8     for text in lines:

//anaconda/envs/tensorflow/lib/python3.5/codecs.py in decode(self, input, final)
    319         # decode input (taking the buffer into account)
    320         data = self.buffer + input
--> 321         (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
    322         # keep undecoded input until the next call
    323         self.buffer = data[consumed:]

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xad in position 1085: invalid start byte

Can you please tell me what happened and how to fix this?

Thank you very much.

[hieucnguyen]

I have the same error as yours. Have tried many different methods from stackoverflow but the error still remains.

[tomasn4a]

I ran into the same error and found this on a PyTorch tutorial. Open the file with encoding 'iso-8859-1':

with open('cornell movie-dialogs corpus/movie_lines.txt', 'r', encoding='iso-8859-1') as f:
    for line in f.readlines():
        sentences[line.split(' +++$+++ ')[0]] = line.split(' +++$+++ ')[-1].replace('\n', "")

[kareemjeiroudi]

Thanx @tomasn4a . It worked!

[khritish29]

hello i am still getting this error
UnicodeDecodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
in ()
----> 1 cleaned_questions, cleaned_answers = clean_data()

1 frames
/content/cornell_data_utils.py in clean_data()
107
108 with open('movie_questions_2.txt', 'r') as f:
--> 109 lines = f.readlines()
110 for line in lines:
111 cleaned_questions.append(cornell_tokenizer(line))

/usr/lib/python3.6/codecs.py in decode(self, input, final)
319 # decode input (taking the buffer into account)
320 data = self.buffer + input
--> 321 (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
322 # keep undecoded input until the next call
323 self.buffer = data[consumed:]

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xad in position 1085: invalid start byte