UnicodeDecodeError utf-8 codec can t decode byte in position invalid start byte

Question

While I importing the file it shows

UnicodeDecodeError: "utf-8" codec can"t decode byte 0xa0 in position 10: invalid start byte

Code:

import pandas as pd
a = pd.read_csv("filename.csv")

Comments

Beautiful. Thanks, that worked for me. Opening the file in Python and sniffing the encoding gave the wrong one.

Answer 1

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,

import pandas as pd

data=pd.read_csv("C:\\Users\\akashkumar\\Downloads\\Customers.csv",encoding='latin1')

print(data.head())

Also Read: What does the error message utf-8 codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 10: invalid start byte indicate?

Comments

Thanks. it is working.

could you explain? What is the reason for this problem and what that "encoding ='latin1' " mean?

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Kunal you're awesome! That was driving me mad

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Hey, @Brij Mohan,

 "encoding ='latin1' " mean means that dev tools are sourcing the files as latin1 instead of the UTF-8 files that they are. This happens irrespective of the Encoding: UTF-8.

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thank you, its works

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thanks for saving my day

Answer 2

Try using :

pd.read_csv(“Your filename", encoding="ISO-8859-1”)

The code that I parsed from some website was converted in this encoding instead of default UTF-8 encoding which is standard.