cannot replace a Text in a CSV using Python

Question

I have a CSV file which has two columns 'title' and 'description' . The Description columns has HTML elements . I am trying to replace 'InterviewNotification' with InterviewAlert .

screenshot here of csv file

This is the code i wrote :

text = open("data.csv", "r")
text = ''.join([i for i in text]).replace("InterviewNotification", "InterviewAlert")
x = open("output.csv","w")
x.writelines(text)
x.close()

But, Im getting this Error :

      File "C:\Users\Zed\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 5786: character maps to <undefined>

Also used pandas , here is the code :

dataframe = pd.read_csv("data.csv")  
# using the replace() method 
dataframe.replace(to_replace ="InterviewNotification", value = "InterviewAlert",  inplace = True)

still no Luck. Help pls

as the raised exception says, you have a UnicodeError. that means your original data is "malformed", i.e. there are char bytes which cannot be decoded with the encoding you're using, which is UTF by default. your data is probably not using it, so you should check the original document encoding, then read the file with open(path, 'rb') and decode the resulting bytes string with the correct format — nxet
– nxet, Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 18:28
Please do not mark your own question text as citations with the vertical bar in front created by > when editing. — bjhend
– bjhend, Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 18:47

Matthew Cox · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-09 18:28:07Z

0

Have you tried specifying the encoding as "utf-8" in your first line? For example:

text = open("data.csv", encoding="utf8")

It seems that your issue may be related to this question

answered Dec 9, 2020 at 18:28

Matthew Cox

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1 Comment

Dani Dev Over a year ago

i did encoding='utf-8-sig' and it worked.

bjhend · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-09 18:43:43Z

0

You open the file but you do not read it. To get the text itself do this:

textFile = open("data.csv", "r")
text = textFile.read()
textFile.close()

Or, to improve the code, use a context manager:

with open("data.csv", "r") as textFile:
    text = textFile.read()

This ensures that the file is properly closed even if the intermediate code raises an exception.

answered Dec 9, 2020 at 18:43

bjhend

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