def _decode_line(line, encoding=None):
    """Decode bytes from binary input streams.

    Defaults to decoding from 'latin1'. That differs from the behavior of
    np.compat.asunicode that decodes from 'ascii'.

    Parameters
    ----------
    line : str or bytes
         Line to be decoded.

    Returns
    -------
    decoded_line : unicode
         Unicode in Python 2, a str (unicode) in Python 3.

    """
    if type(line) is bytes:
        if encoding is None:
            line = line.decode('latin1')
        else:
            line = line.decode(encoding)

    return line