Pandas read _excel: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Question

Trying to read MS Excel file, version 2016. File contains several lists with data. File downloaded from DataBase and it can be opened in MS Office correctly. In example below I changed the file name.

EDIT: file contains russian and english words. Most probably used the Latin-1 encoding, but encoding='latin-1' does not help

import pandas as pd
with open('1.xlsx', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
        data = pd.read_excel(f)

Result:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Without encoding ='utf8'

'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 622: character maps to <undefined>

P.S. Task is to process 52 files, to merge data in every sheet with corresponded sheets in the 52 files. So, please no handle work advices.

Solution 1

Most probably the problem is in Russian symbols.

Charmap is default decoding method used in case no encoding is beeing noticed.

As I see if utf-8 and latin-1 do not help then try to read this file not as

pd.read_excel(f)

but

pd.read_table(f)

or even just

f.readline()

in order to check what is a symbol raise an exeception and delete this symbol/symbols.

Solution 2

The problem is that the original requester is calling read_excel with a filehandle as the first argument. As demonstrated by the last responder, the first argument should be a string containing the filename.

I ran into this same error using:

df = pd.read_excel(open("file.xlsx",'r'))

but correct is:

df = pd.read_excel("file.xlsx")

Solution 3

Most probably you're using Python3. In Python2 this wouldn't happen.

xlsx files are binary (actually they're an xml, but it's compressed), so you need to open them in binary mode. Use this call to open:

open('1.xlsx', 'rb')

There's no full traceback, but I imagine the UnicodeDecodeError comes from the file object, not from read_excel(). That happens because the stream of bytes can contain anything, but we don't want decoding to happen too soon; read_excel() must receive raw bytes and be able to process them.

Solution 4

Panda support encoding feature to read your excel In your case you can use:

df=pd.read_excel('your_file.xlsx',encoding='utf-8')

or if you want in more of system specific without any surpise you can use:

df=pd.read_excel('your_file.xlsx',encoding='sys.getfilesystemencoding()')

View more solutions

Comments

[pure_true]

sys.getfilesystemcoding() does not work too. Unknown encoding

[Nishant Patel]

@pure_true: using sys.getfilesystemcoding("encoding") should be then enforeced to take an encoding pattern, which you need to identify from your file.

[pure_true]

It seems you did not understand me or I do not understand you. When I am putting this sys.getfilesystemcoding() into encoding parametr - I got the error : Unknown encoding . Please explain properly what you meant

[Nishant Patel]

Unknown encoding means your file contains characters which are not recognized by any inbuilt encoding methods. Refer below link to find encoding for your file stackoverflow.com/questions/3710374/…

[pure_true]

It helped indeed. I found that when I just read excel as text the one specific symbol is appeared at the beginning

[quant]

Not only Russian symbols, but also Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other "special characters" can cause this decode problem in python, this depends on the charset used for saving and reading in.

[Sameh Sharaf]

Your answer fixed my problem :) Don't know why it's at the bottom.