title: Error: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0: invalid start byte
body: <p>I am trying to do the following <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial" rel="noreferrer">kaggle assignmnet</a>. I am using gensim package to use word2vec. I am able to create the model and store it to disk. But when I am trying to load the file back I am getting the error below.</p>
  
  <pre><code>    -HP-dx2280-MT-GR541AV:~$ python prog_w2v.py 
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "prog_w2v.py", line 7, in &lt;module&gt;
      models = gensim.models.Word2Vec.load_word2vec_format('300features_40minwords_10context.txt', binary=True)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gensim/models/word2vec.py", line 579, in load_word2vec_format
      header = utils.to_unicode(fin.readline())
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gensim/utils.py", line 190, in any2unicode
      return unicode(text, encoding, errors=errors)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
      return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0: invalid start byte
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I find similar question. But I was unable to solve the problem. My prog_w2v.py is as below.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import gensim
  import time
  start = time.time()    
  models = gensim.models.Word2Vec.load_word2vec_format('300features_40minwords_10context.txt', binary=True) 
  end = time.time()   
  print end-start,"   seconds"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am trying to generate the model using <a href="http://ideone.com/9DXo4w" rel="noreferrer">code here</a>. The program takes about half an hour to generate the model. Hence I am unable to run it many times to debug it. </p>