Decoding HappyBase data from HBase
that data is not valid utf-8, so if you really retrieved it as such from the database, you should check who/what put it in there.
While trying to decode the values from HBase, i am seeing an error but it is apparent that Python thinks it is not in UTF-8 format but the Java application that put the data into HBase encoded it in UTF-8 only 



a = '\x00\x00\x00\x00\x10j\x00\x00\x07\xe8\x02Y'
      a.decode("UTF-8")
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "", line 1, in 
        File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
          return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
      UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe8 in position 9: invalid continuation byte



any thoughts?