'utf-8'编解码器无法解码位置170的字节0x8a：无效的起始字节

Question

I am trying to do this:

fh = request.FILES['csv']
fh = io.StringIO(fh.read().decode())
reader = csv.DictReader(fh, delimiter=";")

This is failing always with the error in title and I spent almost 8 hours on this.

here is my understanding:

I am using python3, so file fh is in bytes. I am encoding it into string and putting it in memory via StringIO.

with csv.DictReader() trying to read it as dict into memory. It is failing here:

also tried with io.StringIO(fh.read().decode('utf-8')) , but same error.

what am I missing? :/

Answer 1

The error is because there is some non-ASCII character in the file and it can't be encoded/decoded. One simple way to avoid this error is to encode/decode such strings with encode()/decode() function as follows (if a is the string with non-ASCII character):

a.decode('utf-8')

Also, you could try opening the file as:

with open('filename', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f: your code using f as file pointer

use 'rb' if your file is binary.