CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonexcelpandas
Denis
Denis

Reputation: 325

Pandas read _excel: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Trying to read MS Excel file, version 2016. File contains several lists with data. File downloaded from DataBase and it can be opened in MS Office correctly. In example below I changed the file name.

EDIT: file contains russian and english words. Most probably used the Latin-1 encoding, but encoding='latin-1' does not help 

import pandas as pd
with open('1.xlsx', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
        data = pd.read_excel(f)

Result:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Without encoding ='utf8' 

'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 622: character maps to <undefined>

P.S. Task is to process 52 files, to merge data in every sheet with corresponded sheets in the 52 files. So, please no handle work advices.

Upvotes: 15

Views: 80477

Answers (6)

xuzepei
xuzepei

Reputation: 1219

If you get an error when reading empty cells or special characters in excel, you can try the code below:

    df = pd.read_excel(excel_filepath, sheet_name=sheet_name, dtype = str)
    df = df.fillna('')
    json_str = df.to_json(orient='records', force_ascii=False)

Upvotes: 1

SAIKO
SAIKO

Reputation: 13

Well sometimes, this error is bound to occur if we have empty cells in the Excel sheet, that is null values in terms of the Pandas data frame, and for that purpose, we can have the following approach which worked for me.

import pandas as pd
import openpyxl

# Load Excel file using openpyxl
wb = openpyxl.load_workbook('excel_sheet_name.xlsx')
sheet = wb.active

# Create an empty DataFrame
data = []

# Iterate over the rows in the sheet
for row in sheet.iter_rows(values_only=True):
    data.append(row)

# Convert to DataFrame
excel_file = pd.DataFrame(data)

Upvotes: 1

Alan Franzoni
Alan Franzoni

Reputation: 3169

Most probably you're using Python3. In Python2 this wouldn't happen.

xlsx files are binary (actually they're an xml, but it's compressed), so you need to open them in binary mode. Use this call to open:

open('1.xlsx', 'rb')

There's no full traceback, but I imagine the UnicodeDecodeError comes from the file object, not from read_excel(). That happens because the stream of bytes can contain anything, but we don't want decoding to happen too soon; read_excel() must receive raw bytes and be able to process them.

Upvotes: 18

Stu
Stu

Reputation: 123

The problem is that the original requester is calling read_excel with a filehandle as the first argument. As demonstrated by the last responder, the first argument should be a string containing the filename.

I ran into this same error using:

df = pd.read_excel(open("file.xlsx",'r'))

but correct is:

df = pd.read_excel("file.xlsx")

Upvotes: 10

plnnvkv
plnnvkv

Reputation: 571

Most probably the problem is in Russian symbols.

Charmap is default decoding method used in case no encoding is beeing noticed.

As I see if utf-8 and latin-1 do not help then try to read this file not as

pd.read_excel(f)

but 

pd.read_table(f)

or even just

f.readline()

in order to check what is a symbol raise an exeception and delete this symbol/symbols.

Upvotes: 3

Nishant Patel
Nishant Patel

Reputation: 1406

Panda support encoding feature to read your excel In your case you can use:

df=pd.read_excel('your_file.xlsx',encoding='utf-8')

or if you want in more of system specific without any surpise you can use:

df=pd.read_excel('your_file.xlsx',encoding='sys.getfilesystemencoding()')

Upvotes: 1

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