CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncsvpandasutf-8
Istvan
Istvan

Reputation: 8562

How to read UTF-8 files with Pandas?

I have a UTF-8 file with twitter data and I am trying to read it into a Python data frame but I can only get an 'object' type instead of unicode strings:

# file 1459966468_324.csv
#1459966468_324.csv: UTF-8 Unicode English text
df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', dtype={'text': unicode})
df.dtypes
text               object
Airline            object
name               object
retweet_count     float64
sentiment          object
tweet_location     object
dtype: object

What is the right way of reading and coercing UTF-8 data into unicode with Pandas?

This does not solve the problem:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding = 'utf8')
df.apply(lambda x: pd.lib.infer_dtype(x.values))

Text file is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/l1x/nlp/master/1459966468_324.csv

Upvotes: 33

Views: 209730

Answers (5)

Colibri
Colibri

Reputation: 792

Perhaps the appropriate parameter for the encoding keyword is:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding='latin1')

Upvotes: 1

cefect
cefect

Reputation: 108

Looks like the location of this function has moved. This worked for me on 1.0.1:

df.apply(lambda x: pd.api.types.infer_dtype(x.values))

Upvotes: 1

Sam
Sam

Reputation: 4090

As the other poster mentioned, you might try:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding='utf8')

However this could still leave you looking at 'object' when you print the dtypes. To confirm they are utf8, try this line after reading the CSV:

df.apply(lambda x: pd.lib.infer_dtype(x.values))

Example output:

args            unicode
date         datetime64
host            unicode
kwargs          unicode
operation       unicode

Upvotes: 45

ptrj
ptrj

Reputation: 5212

Pandas stores strings in objects. In python 3, all string are in unicode by default. So if you use python 3, your data is already in unicode (don't be mislead by type object).

If you have python 2, then use df = pd.read_csv('your_file', encoding = 'utf8'). Then try for example pd.lib.infer_dtype(df.iloc[0,0]) (I guess the first col consists of strings.)

Upvotes: 2

Stefan
Stefan

Reputation: 42875

Use the encoding keyword with the appropriate parameter:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding='utf8')

Upvotes: 5

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