Python (nltk) - UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte
Question: I'm new to NLTK. I'm getting this error and I've searched around for
encoding/decoding and specifically the UnicodeDecodeError but this error seems
specific to the NLTK source code.

Here's the error:

    
    
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "A:\Python\Projects\Test\main.py", line 2, in <module>
        print(pos_tag(word_tokenize("John's big idea isn't all that bad.")))
      File "A:\Python\Python\lib\site-packages\nltk\tag\__init__.py", line 100, in pos_tag
        tagger = load(_POS_TAGGER)
      File "A:\Python\Python\lib\site-packages\nltk\data.py", line 779, in load
        resource_val = pickle.load(opened_resource)
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xcb in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
    

How do I go around fixing this error?  
  
Here's what causes the error:

    
    
    from nltk import pos_tag, word_tokenize
    print(pos_tag(word_tokenize("John's big idea isn't all that bad.")))
    


Answer: I had the same problem with you. I use Python 3.4 in Windows 7.

I had installed the "nltk-3.0.0.win32.exe" (from
[here](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/nltk)). But when i installed the
"nltk-3.0a4.win32.exe" (from [here](http://www.nltk.org/nltk3-alpha/)), my
problem with nltk.pos_tag was solved. Check it.

EDIT: If the second link doesn't work, you can look
[here](https://github.com/nltk/nltk/releases/tag/3.0a4).

