UnicodeDecodeError utf-8 codec can t decode byte 0x8b in position 1 invalid start byte

Question

hi, guys, I need to deal with a zipped CSV file ......but getting this error again and again

import gzip
import csv
import pandas as pd
with gzip.open(path) as f:
    features_train = pd.read_csv(f)
features_train.head() 

Answer 1

Hi@Himanshu,

This type of error will occur if there is any problem to decode any value. To avoid this you can follow the below-given code. 

$ features_train = pd.read_csv('csv_file', encoding='ISO-8859–1')

Answer 2

Hey,  @Himanshu.

It's still most likely gzipped data. gzip's the magic number is 0x1f 0x8b, which is consistent with the UnicodeDecodeError you get.