Pandas read csv file error UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte

Question

I would like to open csv data but keep getting the same error, what can I do to succesfully open csv files using Python?

#Reading in the files
import pandas as pd
data1 = pd.read_csv("data1.csv")

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

Timeless · Accepted Answer · 2023-04-01 21:27:57Z

17

byte 0xff in position 0 means that your .csv is probably encoded in utf-16.

Try this :

data1 = pd.read_csv("data1.csv", encoding="utf-16")

edited Apr 1, 2023 at 21:27

answered Oct 4, 2022 at 12:51

Timeless

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2 Comments

Abe Miessler Over a year ago

How can you tell that `byte 0xff in position 0 means... utf-16."? I'm getting a similar error and was hoping to know how you go about determining the encoding based on the byte value.

Timeless Over a year ago

Hi, I updated my answer and linked a great material about BOMs and encodings.

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