UTF-8 Encoding Error

[subhabangalore at gmail.com]

On Monday, December 26, 2016 at 3:37:37 AM UTC+5:30, Gonzalo V wrote:
> Try utf-8-sig
> El 25 dic. 2016 2:57 AM, "Grady Martin" <> escribió:
> 
> > On 2016年12月22日 22時38分,  wrote:
> >
> >> I am getting the error:
> >> UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 15:
> >> invalid start byte
> >>
> >
> > The following is a reflex of mine, whenever I encounter Python 2 Unicode
> > errors:
> >
> > import sys
> > reload(sys)
> > sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
> >
> > A relevant Stack Exchange thread awaits you here:
> >
> > http://stackoverflow.com/a/21190382/2230956
> > --
> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> >

Thank you for your kind time and answers. 

I tried to open one file in default ASCII format in MS-Windows 7. 
txtf=open("/python27/TestFiles/small_file_1.txt","r").read()
I could write them in UTF-8 using 
cd1=codecs.open("/python27/TestFiles/file1.pos","w", "utf-8-sig")
cd1.write(txtf)

Here, I was getting an error as,
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 150: ordinal not in range(128)

Then I used,
>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

and then wrote 
>>> cd1.write(txtf)
it went fine. 

Now in my actual problem I am writing it bit differently: 

with open('textfile.txt') as f:
        for i, g in enumerate(grouper(n, f, fillvalue=''), 1):
            with open('/Python27/TestFiles/small_filing_{0}.pos'.format(i * n), 'w') as fout:
                fout.writelines(g)

I am trying to fix this. 

If you may kindly suggest.