decode

UnicodeDecodeError, invalid continuation byte

In binary, 0xE9 looks like 1110 1001. If you read about UTF-8 on Wikipedia, you’ll see that such a byte must be followed by two of the form 10xx xxxx. So, for example: But that’s just the mechanical cause of the exception. In this case, you have a string that is almost certainly encoded in … Read more

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘charmap’ codec can’t decode byte X in position Y: character maps to

The file in question is not using the CP1252 encoding. It’s using another encoding. Which one you have to figure out yourself. Common ones are Latin-1 and UTF-8. Since 0x90 doesn’t actually mean anything in Latin-1, UTF-8 (where 0x90 is a continuation byte) is more likely. You specify the encoding when you open the file:

How do you decode Base64 data in Python?

worked for me. At the risk of pasting an offensively-long result, I got: \xbb\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc5!7\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc5!\xb2\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x14x\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x14\xf6\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x15t\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x15\xf2\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x16pC5\x9f\xf9D\xc7\x16\xeeC[\xb5\xf5D\xc7\x17lCG\x1b;D\xc7\x17\xeaB\xe3\x0b\xa6D\xc7\x18h\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x18\xe6\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x19d\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\x19\xe2\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\xfe\xb4\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\xff3\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc7\xff\xb2\x00\x00\x00\x00D\xc8\x001\x00\x00\x00\x00′