decoding shift-jis: "illegal multibyte sequence"

I'm trying to decode a shift-jis encoded string, like this: string.decode('shift-jis').encode('utf-8') to be able to view it in my program. When I come across 2 shift-jis characters, in hex "0x87 0x54" and "0x87 0x55", I get this error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'shift_jis' codec can't decode bytes in position 12-13: illegal multibyte sequence But I'm sure they are valid shift-jis characters: http://www

[midnightseminar]

メモ："illegal multibyte sequence"のエラーが出た時は、'shift-jis'ではなく'shift_jisx0213'と指定してみる