Python NLTK Word Tokenize UnicodeDecode Error
<p>I get the error when trying the below code. I try to read from a text file and tokenize the words using nltk. Any ideas? The text file can be found <a href="https://pythonprogramming.net/static/downloads/short_reviews/positive.txt" rel="nofollow">here</a></p>

<pre><code>from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
short_pos = open("./positive.txt","r").read()
#short_pos = short_pos.decode('utf-8').lower()
short_pos_words = word_tokenize(short_pos)
</code></pre>

<p>Error:</p>

<pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "sentimentAnalysis.py", line 19, in &lt;module&gt;
    short_pos_words = word_tokenize(short_pos)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py", line 106, in word_tokenize
    return [token for sent in sent_tokenize(text, language)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/__init__.py", line 91, in sent_tokenize
    return tokenizer.tokenize(text)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1226, in tokenize
    return list(self.sentences_from_text(text, realign_boundaries))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1274, in sentences_from_text
    return [text[s:e] for s, e in self.span_tokenize(text, realign_boundaries)]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1265, in span_tokenize
    return [(sl.start, sl.stop) for sl in slices]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1304, in _realign_boundaries
    for sl1, sl2 in _pair_iter(slices):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 311, in _pair_iter
    for el in it:
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1280, in _slices_from_text
    if self.text_contains_sentbreak(context):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1325, in text_contains_sentbreak
    for t in self._annotate_tokens(self._tokenize_words(text)):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 1460, in _annotate_second_pass
    for t1, t2 in _pair_iter(tokens):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 310, in _pair_iter
    prev = next(it)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 577, in _annotate_first_pass
    for aug_tok in tokens:
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/tokenize/punkt.py", line 542, in _tokenize_words
    for line in plaintext.split('\n'):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xed in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)
</code></pre>

<p>Thanks for your support.</p>