UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode bytes in position 3-6: invalid data

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The string you’re trying to parse as a JSON is not encoded in UTF-8. Most likely it is encoded in ISO-8859-1. Try the following:

json.loads(unicode(opener.open(...), "ISO-8859-1"))

That will handle any umlauts that might get in the JSON message.

You should read Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). I hope that it will clarify some issues you’re having around Unicode.

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