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

This error occurs when the Python interpreter tries to decode a byte string using the UTF-8 codec, but encounters a byte that is not a valid start byte for a UTF-8 encoded character.

The byte 0xFF is not a valid start byte for a UTF-8 encoded character. It is often used as a byte-order mark (BOM) in some encodings, such as UTF-16, but it has no meaning in UTF-8.

To resolve this error, you can try one or more of the following:

1. Determine the encoding of the input file or data and use the appropriate codec to decode it.

2. Remove any byte-order marks (BOMs) from the input data before decoding it.

3. Use a different codec, such as latin-1, to decode the input data if the encoding is unknown or ambiguous.

4. Use the errors='ignore' option when decoding the data to ignore any invalid bytes.

Here's an example of how to decode a byte string using the latin-1 codec:

data = b'\xff\xfeH\x00e\x00l\x00l\x00o\x00'
decoded_data = data.decode('latin-1')
print(decoded_data)

Output:

ÿþH e l l o