I think the best answer (in Python 3) is to use the errors= parameter:
with open('evil_unicode.txt', 'r', errors="replace") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
Proof:
>>> s = b'\xe5abc\nline2\nline3'
>>> with open('evil_unicode.txt','wb') as f:
... f.write(s)
...
16
>>> with open('evil_unicode.txt', 'r') as f:
... lines = f.readlines()
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/codecs.py", line 319, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 0: invalid continuation byte
>>> with open('evil_unicode.txt', 'r', errors="replace") as f:
... lines = f.readlines()
...
>>> lines
['�abc\n', 'line2\n', 'line3']
>>>
Note that the errors= can be replace or ignore. Here’s what ignore looks like:
>>> with open('evil_unicode.txt', 'r', errors="ignore") as f:
... lines = f.readlines()
...
>>> lines
['abc\n', 'line2\n', 'line3']