UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 about dbfread HOT 1 OPEN

I'm not sure if I have an answer for you but have you tried specifying the encoding?

If you know what encoding you have, you might be able to get it to work this way. The DBF() constructor's optional second argument is for an encoding:

table = DBF('asset.dbf', 'UTF-8')
for record in table:
    print(record)

table = DBF('asset.dbf', 'Latin-1')
for record in table:
    print(record)

Another option is to set the char_decode_errors handler. The argument defaults to 'strict' when unspecified.

So this...

table = DBF('asset.dbf')

Is the same as...

table = DBF('asset.dbf', char_decode_errors='strict')

But you could relax this requirement by specifying a more forgiving error handler (see Python's Error Handlers docs for more options):

table = DBF('asset.dbf', char_decode_errors='replace')

You might settle on some combination of the two... defining an expected encoding and loosening the error handling behavior:

table = DBF('asset.dbf', 'Latin-1', char_decode_errors='replace')
for record in table:
    print(record)

from dbfread.