>>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "strict") Traceback (most recent call last): ... UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0: invalid start byte >>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "replace") '\ufffdabc' >>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "backslashreplace") '\\x80abc' >>> b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "ignore") 'abc'