UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 4: invalid start byte

Question

I exported a csv file from Microsoft Excel. It showed properly in Jupyter notebook with pandas and numpy as below:

import pandas as pd
pd1 = pd.read_csv('test1.csv', encoding='utf-8')

There were no error messages the first time, but I just opened the csv file then just saved as a new name.

all the time I got a unicodeerror message

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 4: invalid start byte

The data has strange letters as shown below. Even if there were strange letters, there was no problem at first.

2 columns, 6 rows

I have to handle all languages, so I really want to know how to encode them. How to solve this problem?

Answer 1

When you save as, there will be a selection of the encoding format

Try to save as and see if it works.👍