PyShp, shp to geojson in python

shp2gj.py

 import shapefile
   # read the shapefile
   reader = shapefile.Reader("my.shp")
   fields = reader.fields[1:]
   field_names = [field[0] for field in fields]
   buffer = []
   for sr in reader.shapeRecords():
       atr = dict(zip(field_names, sr.record))
       geom = sr.shape.__geo_interface__
       buffer.append(dict(type="Feature", \
        geometry=geom, properties=atr)) 
   
   # write the GeoJSON file
   from json import dumps
   geojson = open("pyshp-demo.json", "w")
   geojson.write(dumps({"type": "FeatureCollection",\
    "features": buffer}, indent=2) + "\n")
   geojson.close()

Thanks for that nice little feature!
But I keep getting a decode error when running this script on the natural earth countries shapefile:
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 0: invalid continuation byte
But with the places shapefile it works perfectly fine!
Do you have any idea where that might come from?

hey man i had the same issue but look

basically before doing something like reader.shapeRecords() you gotta change the encoding type, in my case i was using some data from Guadalajara, MX and i had to change the encoding to be latin1 as you can see in the screenshot, then, it worked normally

Hey I am trying to do same thing using pycharm but its giving error feedback. can you assist me sire.