CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncsvencodingutf-8
Vital
Vital

Reputation: 513

'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 4276: invalid start byte

I try to read and print the following file: txt.tsv (https://www.sec.gov/files/dera/data/financial-statement-and-notes-data-sets/2017q3_notes.zip)

According to the SEC the data set is provided in a single encoding, as follows:

Tab Delimited Value (.txt): utf-8, tab-delimited, \n- terminated lines, with the first line containing the field names in lowercase.

My current code:

import csv

with open('txt.tsv') as tsvfile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(tsvfile, dialect='excel-tab')
    for row in reader:
        print(row)

All attempts ended with the following error message:

'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 4276: invalid start byte

I am a bit lost. Can anyone help me?

Upvotes: 51

Views: 189258

Answers (8)

Jeff E
Jeff E

Reputation: 688

We have to handle files from several sources and could have any encoding. We found TextIOWrapper with error handling very useful; in our case: errors='replace'. Docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/io.html#io.TextIOWrapper

Upvotes: 0

Maximiliano Rivas
Maximiliano Rivas

Reputation: 1

I was able to open a csv file that gave me that answer, recoding the file by opening it in a notepad and saving it in utf-8, there it was able to open later without problems

Upvotes: 0

Suresh Gautam
Suresh Gautam

Reputation: 893

I also encountered the same issue and worked while using latin1 encoding, refer to the sample code to apply in your codebase. Give a try if above resolution doesn't work.

df=pd.read_csv("../CSV_FILE.csv",na_values=missing, encoding='latin1')

Upvotes: 3

Tomasz Gandor
Tomasz Gandor

Reputation: 8833

If the input has a stray '\xa0', then it's not in UTF-8, full stop.

Yes, you have to either recode it to UTF-8 (see: iconv, recode commands, or a lot of text editors and IDEs can do it), or read it using an 8-bit encoding (as all the other answers suggest).

What you should ask yourself is - what is this character after all (0xa0 or 160)? Well, in many 8-bit encodings it's a non-breaking space (like   in HTML). For at least one DOS encoding it's an accented "a" character. That's why you need to look at the result of decoding it from the 8-bit encoding.

BTW, sometimes people say "UTF-8", and they mean "mostly ASCII, I guess". And if it was a non-breaking space, they weren't that far:

In [1]: '\xa0'.encode()
Out[1]: b'\xc2\xa0'

One exptra preceeding '\xc2' byte would do the trick.

Upvotes: 2

raj kumar
raj kumar

Reputation: 31

ds = pd.read_csv('/Dataset/test.csv', encoding='windows-1252')

Works fine for me, thanks.

Upvotes: 3

Ghulam Dastgeer
Ghulam Dastgeer

Reputation: 187

i have the same error message for .csv file, and This Worked for me :

     df = pd.read_csv('Text.csv',encoding='ANSI')

Upvotes: 1

Hasim D
Hasim D

Reputation: 142

If someone works on Turkish data, then I suggest this line: 

df = pd.read_csv("text.txt",encoding='windows-1254')

Upvotes: 7

koPytok
koPytok

Reputation: 3713

Encoding in the file is 'windows-1252'. Use:

open('txt.tsv', encoding='windows-1252')

Upvotes: 83

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