UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python "'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte"

Question

I am having having trouble reading a csv file using read_csv in Pandas. Here's the error:

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

I have tried a bunch of different encoding types with the file I am dealing with and none seem to work. The file is from Google's Search Ads 360 product, which says the csv should be in the 'UFT-16' format. Strangely, if I open the file in Excel and save it as a utf-8 format, I can use read_csv normally.

I've tried the solutions to a similar problem here, but they did not work for me. This is the only code I am running:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('path/file.csv')

Edit: I read in the file as tab delimited, and that seemed to work. I still don't understand why I got the error I did when I tried to read it in as a normal csv. Any insight into this would be appreciated!!

Alejandro A · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-01 19:40:34Z

1

Try this encoding:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('path/file.csv',encoding='cp1252')

answered Jul 1, 2020 at 19:40

Alejandro A

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Kyle Zengo Over a year ago

I tried that one already :( I should note that when I use that encoding or UTF-16, I don't get the same error. When I use one of these encoding, the csv is not loaded properly. The data is smushed into a few columns.

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