I'm trying to read a database produced by an ancient version of the ACDsee photo manager program (don't ask). When I try to read it simply as: table = DBF ('asset.dbf') for record in table: print ...

return loads (fp.read (), ^^^^^^^^^ File "D:\Program Files\python\Lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode return codecs.charmap_decode (input,self.errors,decoding_table) [0] ...

In Python 3.x, byte strings and Unicode strings are separate data types, and it's important to be explicit when working with bytes to avoid encoding errors.