CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpandascharacter-encodingspecial-characters
Karol Duarte
Karol Duarte

Reputation: 405

pandas .replace not working in Python 2.7

I'm having quite a lot of trouble understanding the .replace from pandas for special characters.

I have a dataframe that I need to change some text for greek letters. I have done it before, on the same code, and it worked perfectly, but for some reason I could not figure out the second time it dit not work.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'a' = [Aa_alpha_bb, Cc_beta_dd, Ee_gamma_ff]})

#then I did:
df['a'].replace({'_alpha_':'α', '_beta_':'β', '_gamma_':'γ'}, regex = True, inplace = True)

But I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I have also tried using df['a'].astype(str), but to no avail

I have no experience using special characters and encoding in python. I'm also new using python 2.7, because the project I'm working on now requires this specific version. Can someone help me?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 84

Answers (1)

Anton van der Wel
Anton van der Wel

Reputation: 451

I am pretty sure this has to do with your file not being utf-8 encoded. See other stackoverflow question: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 1

Throwing in a first line being equal to:

# coding: utf-8
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

should do the trick. In python 3 this is by default set to utf8

Upvotes: 1

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