How to fix UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python?

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mahmoud2506

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2022-05-25

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In pandas, we are allowed to import a CSV file with the help of pandas.read_csv() method. Sometimes, while importing a CSV file we might get the following type of error.

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mahmoud2506

2022-05-25

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# Importing pandas package

import pandas as pd

# Importing dataset

data1=pd.read_csv('C:\Users\hp\Desktop\Includehelp\mycsv.csv')

Error:

Fix UnicodeDecodeError | Output 1

Fixing UnicodeDecodeError Error

The easiest way to fix this error is to provide the actual path of the CSV file inside the read_csv() method. The selection of slash ('\') matters a lot. A path of a file may contain a backslash to represent a folder but when it comes to pass the complete path as a parameter inside the method, we need to use the forward slash ('/') to import the CSV file successfully.

Example:

# Importing pandas package

import pandas as pd

# Importing dataset

data=pd.read_csv('C:/Users/hp/Desktop/Includehelp/mycsv.csv')

# Print the dataset

print(data)

Output:

Fix UnicodeDecodeError | Output 2

Sometimes, read_csv() method takes encoding option as a parameter to deal with files in different formats. Try to use encoding= utf-8" to fix the error. Other alternative for encoding="utf-8" is encoding="ISO-8859-1".

Example:

# Importing pandas package

import pandas as pd

# Importing dataset

data=pd.read_csv('C:/Users/hp/Desktop/Includehelp/mycsv1.csv', encoding="utf-8")

# Print the dataset

print(data)

Output:

Fix UnicodeDecodeError | Output 3