UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python “'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte”

Question

I am having having trouble reading a csv file using read_csv in Pandas. Here's the error:

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

I have tried a bunch of different encoding types with the file I am dealing with and none seem to work. The file is from Google's Search Ads 360 product, which says the csv should be in the 'UFT-16' format . Strangely, if I open the file in Excel and save it as a utf-8 format, I can use read_csv normally.

I've tried the solutions to a similar problem here , but they did not work for me. This is the only code I am running:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('path/file.csv')

Edit: I read in the file as tab delimited, and that seemed to work. I still don't understand why I got the error I did when I tried to read it in as a normal csv. Any insight into this would be appreciated!!

Answer 1

Try this encoding:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('path/file.csv',encoding='cp1252')