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Decode error with Pandas reading a .txt that only occurs on one compuer

I have a comma-separated .txt file with French characters such as Vétérinaire and Désinfectant.
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('somefile.txt', sep=',', header=None, encoding='utf-8')
[Decode error - output not utf-8]
I have read many Q&A posts (including this) and tried many different encoding such as 'latin1' and 'utf-16', they didn't work. However, I tried to run the exact same script on the different Windows 10 computer with similar Python setup (all Python 3.6), it works perfectly fine in the other computer.
Edit: I tried this. Using encoding='cp1252' helps for some of the .txt files I want to import, but for a few .txt files, it gives the following error.
File "C:\Program_Files_Extra\Anaconda3\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 15, in decode
return codecs.charmap_decode(input,errors,decoding_table)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 25: character maps to <undefined>
Edit:
Trying to identify encoding from chardet
import chardet
import pandas as pd
test_txt = 'somefile.txt'
rawdata = open(test_txt, 'rb').read()
result = chardet.detect(rawdata)
charenc = result['encoding']
print (charenc)
df = pd.read_csv(test_txt, sep=',', header=None, encoding=charenc)
print (df.head())
utf-8
[Decode error - output not utf-8]

Your program opens your files with a default encoding and that doesn't match the contents of the file you are trying to open.
Option 1: Decode the file contents to python string objects:
rawdata = open(test_txt, 'rb', encoding='UTF8').read()
Option 2: Open the csv file in an editor like Sublime Text and save it with utf-8 encoding to easily read the file through pandas.

Python pandas load csv ANSI Format as UTF-8

I want to load a CSV File with pandas in Jupyter Notebooks which contains characters like ä,ö,ü,ß.
When i open the csv file with Notepad++ here is one example row which causes trouble in ANSI Format:
Empf„nger;Empf„ngerStadt;Empf„ngerStraáe;Empf„ngerHausnr.;Empf„ngerPLZ;Empf„ngerLand
The correct UTF-8 outcome for Empf„nger should be: Empfänger
Now when i load the CSV Data in Python 3.6 pandas on Windows with the following code:
df_a = pd.read_csv('file.csv',sep=';',encoding='utf-8')
I get and Error Message:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position xy: invalid continuation byte
Position 'xy' is the position where the character occurs that causes the error message
when i use the ansi format to load my csv file it works but display the umlaute incorrect.
Example code:
df_a = pd.read_csv('afile.csv',sep=';',encoding='ANSI')
Empfänger is represented as: Empf„nger
Note: i have tried to convert the file to UTF-8 in Notepad++ and load it afterwards with the pandas module but i still get the same error.
I have searched online for a solution but the provided solutions such as "change format in notepad++ to utf-8" or "use encoding='UTF-8'" or 'latin1' which gives me the same result as ANSI format or
import chardet
with open('afile.csv', 'rb') as f:
result = chardet.detect(f.readline())
df_a = pd.read_csv('afile.csv',sep=';',encoding=result['encoding'])
didnt work for me.
encoding='cp1252'
throws the following exception:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 2: character maps to <undefined>
I also tried to replace Strings afterwards with the x.replace() method but the character ü disappears completely after loaded into a pandas DataFrame

If you don't know which are your file encoding, I think that the fastest approach is to open the file on a text editor, like Notepad++ to check how your file are encoding.
Then you go to the python documentation and look for the correct codec to use.
In your case , ANSI, the codec is 'mbcs', so your code will look like these
df_a = pd.read_csv('file.csv',sep=';',encoding='mbcs')

When EmpfängerStraße shows up as Empf„ngerStraáe when decoded as ”ANSI”, or more correctly cp1250 in this case, then the actual encoding of the data is most likely cp850:
print 'Empf„ngerStraáe'.decode('utf8').encode('cp1250').decode('cp850')
Or Python 3, where literal strings are already unicode strings:
print("Empf„ngerStraáe".encode("cp1250").decode("cp850"))

I couldnt find a proper solution after trying out all the well known encodings from ISO-8859-1 to 8859-15, from UTF-8 to UTF-32, from Windows-1250-1258 and nothing worked properly. So my guess is that the text encoding got corrupted during the export. My own solution to this is to load the textfile in a Dataframe with Windows-1251 as it does not cut out special characters in my text file and then replaced all broken characters with the corresponding ones. Its a rather dissatisfying solution that takes a lot of time to compute but its better than nothing.

You could use the encoding value UTF-16LE to solve the problem
pd.read_csv("./file.csv", encoding="UTF-16LE")
The file.csv should be saved using encoding UTF-16LE by NotePad++, option UCS-2 LE BOM
Best,

cp1252 works on both linux and windows to decode latin1 encoded files.
df = pd.read_csv('data.csv',sep=';',encoding='cp1252')
Although, if you are running on a windows machine, I would recommend using
df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', sep=';', encoding='mbcs')
Ironically, using 'latin1' in the encoding does not always work. Especially if you want to convert file to a different encoding.

Error reading csv file using pandas [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python
(25 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
what i am trying is reading a csv to make a dataframe---making changes in a column---again updating/reflecting changed value into same csv(to_csv)- again trying to read that csv to make another dataframe...there i am getting an error
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 7: invalid continuation byte
my code is
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("D:\ss.csv")
df.columns #o/p is Index(['CUSTOMER_MAILID', 'False', 'True'], dtype='object')
df['True'] = df['True'] + 2 #making changes to one column of type float
df.to_csv("D:\ss.csv") #updating that .csv
df1 = pd.read_csv("D:\ss.csv") #again trying to read that csv
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 7: invalid continuation byte
So please suggest how can i avoid the error and be able to read that csv again to a dataframe.
I know somewhere i am missing "encode = some codec type" or "decode = some type" while reading and writing to csv.
But i don't know what exactly should be changed.so need help.

Known encoding
If you know the encoding of the file you want to read in,
you can use
pd.read_csv('filename.txt', encoding='encoding')
These are the possible encodings:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings
Unknown encoding
If you do not know the encoding, you can try to use chardet, however this is not guaranteed to work. It is more a guess work.
import chardet
import pandas as pd
with open('filename.csv', 'rb') as f:
result = chardet.detect(f.read()) # or readline if the file is large
pd.read_csv('filename.csv', encoding=result['encoding'])

Is that error happening on your first read of the data, or on the second read after you write it out and read it back in again? My guess is that it's actually happening on the first read of the data, because your CSV has an encoding that isn't UTF-8.
Try opening that CSV file in Notepad++, or Excel, or LibreOffice. Does your data source have the ç (C with cedilla) character in it? If it does, then that 0xE7 byte you're seeing is probably the ç encoded in either Latin-1 or Windows-1252 (called "cp1252" in Python).
Looking at the documentation for the Pandas read_csv() function, I see it has an encoding parameter, which should be the name of the encoding you expect that CSV file to be in. So try adding encoding="cp1252" to your read_csv() call, as follows:
df = pd.read_csv(r"D:\ss.csv", encoding="cp1252")
Note that I added the character r in front of the filename, so that it will be considered a "raw string" and backslashes won't be treated specially. That way you don't get a surprise when you change the filename from ss.csv to new-ss.csv, where the string D:\new-ss.csv would be read as D, :, newline character, e, w, etc.
Anyway, try that encoding parameter on your first read_csv() call and see if it works. (It's only a guess, since I don't know your actual data. If the data file isn't private and isn't too large, try posting the data file so we can see its contents -- that would let us do better than just guessing.)

One simple solution is you can open the csv file in an editor like Sublime Text and save it with 'utf-8' encoding. Then we can easily read the file through pandas.

Above method used by importing and then detecting file type works
import chardet
import pandas as pd
import chardet
with open('filename.csv', 'rb') as f:
result = chardet.detect(f.read()) # or readline if the file is large
pd.read_csv('filename.csv', encoding=result['encoding'])

Yes you'll get this error. I have work around with this problem, by opening csv file in notepad++ and changing the encoding throught Encoding menu -> convert to UTF-8. Then saving the file. Then again running python program over it.
Other solution is using codecs module in python for encoding-decoding of files. I haven't used that.

I am new to python. Ran into this exact issue when I manually changed the extension on my excel file to .csv and tried to read it with read_csv. However, if I opened the excel file and saved as csv file instead it seemed to work.

Error UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

https://github.com/affinelayer/pix2pix-tensorflow/tree/master/tools
An error occurred when compiling "process.py" on the above site.
python tools/process.py --input_dir data -- operation resize --outp
ut_dir data2/resize
data/0.jpg -> data2/resize/0.png
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "tools/process.py", line 235, in <module>
main()
File "tools/process.py", line 167, in main
src = load(src_path)
File "tools/process.py", line 113, in load
contents = open(path).read()
File"/home/user/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow_2/lib/python3.5/codecs.py", line 321, 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 byte
What is the cause of the error?
Python's version is 3.5.2.

Python tries to convert a byte-array (a bytes which it assumes to be a utf-8-encoded string) to a unicode string (str). This process of course is a decoding according to utf-8 rules. When it tries this, it encounters a byte sequence which is not allowed in utf-8-encoded strings (namely this 0xff at position 0).
Since you did not provide any code we could look at, we only could guess on the rest.
From the stack trace we can assume that the triggering action was the reading from a file (contents = open(path).read()). I propose to recode this in a fashion like this:
with open(path, 'rb') as f:
contents = f.read()
That b in the mode specifier in the open() states that the file shall be treated as binary, so contents will remain a bytes. No decoding attempt will happen this way.

Use this solution it will strip out (ignore) the characters and return the string without them. Only use this if your need is to strip them not convert them.
with open(path, encoding="utf8", errors='ignore') as f:
Using errors='ignore'
You'll just lose some characters. but if your don't care about them as they seem to be extra characters originating from a the bad formatting and programming of the clients connecting to my socket server.
Then its a easy direct solution.
reference

Use encoding format ISO-8859-1 to solve the issue.

Had an issue similar to this, Ended up using UTF-16 to decode. my code is below.
with open(path_to_file,'rb') as f:
contents = f.read()
contents = contents.rstrip("\n").decode("utf-16")
contents = contents.split("\r\n")
this would take the file contents as an import, but it would return the code in UTF format. from there it would be decoded and seperated by lines.

I've come across this thread when suffering the same error, after doing some research I can confirm, this is an error that happens when you try to decode a UTF-16 file with UTF-8.
With UTF-16 the first characther (2 bytes in UTF-16) is a Byte Order Mark (BOM), which is used as a decoding hint and doesn't appear as a character in the decoded string. This means the first byte will be either FE or FF and the second, the other.
Heavily edited after I found out the real answer

It simply means that one chose the wrong encoding to read the file.
On Mac, use file -I file.txt to find the correct encoding. On Linux, use file -i file.txt.

I had a similar issue with PNG files. and I tried the solutions above without success.
this one worked for me in python 3.8
with open(path, "rb") as f:

use only
base64.b64decode(a)
instead of
base64.b64decode(a).decode('utf-8')

This is due to the different encoding method when read the file. In python, it defaultly
encode the data with unicode. However, it may not works in various platforms.
I propose an encoding method which can help you solve this if 'utf-8' not works.
with open(path, newline='', encoding='cp1252') as csvfile:
reader = csv.reader(csvfile)
It should works if you change the encoding method here. Also, you can find other encoding method here standard-encodings , if above doesn't work for you.

Those getting similar errors while handling Pandas for data frames use the following solution.
example solution.
df = pd.read_csv("File path", encoding='cp1252')

I had this UnicodeDecodeError while trying to read a '.csv' file using pandas.read_csv(). In my case, I could not manage to overcome this issue using other encoder types. But instead of using
pd.read_csv(filename, delimiter=';')
I used:
pd.read_csv(open(filename, 'r'), delimiter=';')
which just seems working fine for me.
Note that: In open() function, use 'r' instead of 'rb'. Because 'rb' returns bytes object that causes to happen this decoder error in the first place, that is the same problem in the read_csv(). But 'r' returns str which is needed since our data is in .csv, and using the default encoding='utf-8' parameter, we can easily parse the data using read_csv() function.

if you are receiving data from a serial port, make sure you are using the right baudrate (and the other configs ) : decoding using (utf-8) but the wrong config will generate the same error
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
to check your serial port config on linux use : stty -F /dev/ttyUSBX -a

I had a similar issue and searched all the internet for this problem
if you have this problem just copy your HTML code in a new HTML file and use the normal <meta charset="UTF-8">
and it will work....
just create a new HTML file in the same location and use a different name

Check the path of the file to be read. My code kept on giving me errors until I changed the path name to present working directory. The error was:
newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

If you are on a mac check if you for a hidden file, .DS_Store. After removing the file my program worked.

I had a similar problem.
Solved it by:
import io
with io.open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as fn:
lines = fn.readlines()
However, I had another problem. Some html files (in my case) were not utf-8, so I received a similar error. When I excluded those html files, everything worked smoothly.
So, except from fixing the code, check also the files you are reading from, maybe there is an incompatibility there indeed.

You have to use the encoding as latin1 to read this file as there are some special character in this file, use the below code snippet to read the file.
The problem here is the encoding type. When Python can't convert the data to be read, it gives an error.
You can you latin1 or other encoding values.
I say try and test to find the right one for your dataset.

I have the same issue when processing a file generated from Linux. It turns out it was related with files containing question marks..

Following code worked in my case:
df = pd.read_csv(filename,sep = '\t', encoding='cp1252')

If possible, open the file in a text editor and try to change the encoding to UTF-8. Otherwise do it programatically at the OS level.

Error while importing csv in Python using pandas

I have started to learn Python for data science. I am already using R on almost daily basis. I stack on first step. I try to import csv file using Pandas read_csv file method. I have problem with encoding the file while importing.
If I use read.csv from R everything is ok:
df <- read.csv2("some_path/myfile.txt", stringsAsFactors = FALSE, encoding = 'UTF-8')
but if I use similar code in python:
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("some_path/myfile.txt", sep = ';', encoding= 'utf8')
it returns an error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc6 in position 13: invalid continuation byte
How is it possible that I can import a file with "utf-8" encoding in R, but not in Python?
If I use different encoding (latin1 or iso-8859-1), it imports the file successfully but characters are not encoded in right way.

Even if I don't understand why UTF-8 works in R but not in Python, I found out that cp1250 encoding works fine.

Use encoding "UTF-16". I used that to resolve my issue with the same error.