Jupyter Notebook编码错误？

Question

I started to learn pandas by following this tutorial:

https://github.com/jvns/pandas-cookbook

Right in the first chapter I try very elementary example of reading a csv file. The example goes like this:

import pandas as pd
broken_df = pd.read_csv("..\data\bikes.csv")

I get a lengthy error message, which ends with a line:

FileNotFoundError: File b'..\\data\x08ikes.csv' does not exist

So although I write 'bikes.csv', which I have in the correct folder, the program seems to be searching for a file called 'x08ikes.csv'. Could this be an encoding error? sys.getdefaultencoding() returns 'utf-8'.

I am using Anaconda3 for 64bit Windows, version 4.4.0. My browser is Brave. Any ideas what is going wrong here?

Answer 1

The backslash character '\\' has special meaning; it tries to "escape" the next character. In this case '\\b' is an escape character that does have a meaning. There are three ways around this:

Escape the escapes:

You can use the backslash to escape the next backslash, telling Python "this is just another character"

broken_df = pd.read_csv("..\\data\\bikes.csv")

Use a raw string:

Placing r at the beginning of a string tells Python to interpret everything in the string as-is

broken_df = pd.read_csv(r"..\data\bikes.csv")

Use forward slashes:

This is specific to file paths. You can trace the directory to you file using forward slashes instead of backslashes.

broken_df = pd.read_csv("../data/bikes.csv")

Answer 2

What you can do is, upload the bikes.csv in to the Jupyter Home "Files" tab. Open it and you may still see the message. Then go to File->New, and you may get a new blank file. Open the original bikes.csv in notepad, copy and paste the content in to the file in jupyter notebook. This may help to resolve it.

Then you can run the following code.

import pandas as pd
broken_df = pd.read_csv("..\data\bikes.csv")