Convert NER dataset to spaCy formt for Arabic text - nlp

Question

I tried to convert a NER dataset written in English to spaCy format, everything worked fine but when I tried to do the same thing with a dataset written in Arabic:
!python -m spacy convert -c iob -s -n 10 -b nlp /gdrive/MyDrive/LearningSpacy/SimpleNER-Dataset.txt .
I got this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 193, in _run_module_as_main
"__main__", mod_spec)
File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 85, in _run_code
exec(code, run_globals)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/spacy/__main__.py", line 4, in <module>
setup_cli()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/spacy/cli/_util.py", line 71, in setup_cli
command(prog_name=COMMAND)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click/core.py", line 829, in __call__
return self.main(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click/core.py", line 782, in main
rv = self.invoke(ctx)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click/core.py", line 1259, in invoke
return _process_result(sub_ctx.command.invoke(sub_ctx))
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click/core.py", line 1066, in invoke
return ctx.invoke(self.callback, **ctx.params)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click/core.py", line 610, in invoke
return callback(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/typer/main.py", line 532, in wrapper
return callback(**use_params) # type: ignore
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/spacy/cli/convert.py", line 74, in convert_cli
converter = _get_converter(msg, converter, input_path)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/spacy/cli/convert.py", line 257, in _get_converter
input_data = file_.read()
File "/usr/lib/python3.7/codecs.py", line 322, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byt
This is how the SimpleNER-Dataset.txt looks like: