To prevent decoding and encoding errors in Python, ensure proper character encoding throughout your code. Use Unicode (UTF-8) consistently, and handle exceptions with `try` and `except` blocks.

For example, if you link to a stylesheet that uses UTF-8 encoding, but the browser assumes it is ASCII, it may not be able to interpret some characters correctly, such as accented letters or emojis.

Shift JIS is a character encoding for the Japanese language but does not support all Unicode characters. Some visually similar characters have different code points and cannot be encoded in Shift JIS, ...

It might have something to do with UTF-8 character set- Originally my IDE wasn't setup correctly and it worked fine (UTF-8 charset seemed to have been discarded and replaced with random symbols).