Encoding Error when Importing CSV into Pandas

Question

I'm trying to import this csv into pandas, but I'm getting an error. Here's my code:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("cc-est2019-alldata.csv")

When I run it, I get this error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._convert_tokens()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._convert_with_dtype()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._string_convert()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers._string_box_utf8()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 2: invalid continuation byte

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-11-b0630f0e9978> in <module>
----> 1 df = pd.read_csv("cc-est2019-alldata.csv")

/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in parser_f(filepath_or_buffer, sep, delimiter, header, names, index_col, usecols, squeeze, prefix, mangle_dupe_cols, dtype, engine, converters, true_values, false_values, skipinitialspace, skiprows, skipfooter, nrows, na_values, keep_default_na, na_filter, verbose, skip_blank_lines, parse_dates, infer_datetime_format, keep_date_col, date_parser, dayfirst, cache_dates, iterator, chunksize, compression, thousands, decimal, lineterminator, quotechar, quoting, doublequote, escapechar, comment, encoding, dialect, error_bad_lines, warn_bad_lines, delim_whitespace, low_memory, memory_map, float_precision)
    674         )
    675 
--> 676         return _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    677 
    678     parser_f.__name__ = name

/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    452 
    453     try:
--> 454         data = parser.read(nrows)
    455     finally:
    456         parser.close()

/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in read(self, nrows)
   1131     def read(self, nrows=None):
   1132         nrows = _validate_integer("nrows", nrows)
-> 1133         ret = self._engine.read(nrows)
   1134 
   1135         # May alter columns / col_dict

/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in read(self, nrows)
   2035     def read(self, nrows=None):
   2036         try:
-> 2037             data = self._reader.read(nrows)
   2038         except StopIteration:
   2039             if self._first_chunk:

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader.read()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._read_low_memory()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._read_rows()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._convert_column_data()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._convert_tokens()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._convert_with_dtype()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._string_convert()

pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers._string_box_utf8()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 2: invalid continuation byte

What does this mean and how can I fix it? I tried using the solution explained here, but it didn't work out: https://www.kaggle.com/paultimothymooney/how-to-resolve-a-unicodedecodeerror-for-a-csv-file .

Here's a link to the csv (warning, the file is 170mb): https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2010-2019/counties/asrh/cc-est2019-alldata.csv

How can I solve this error?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Try it with this encoding:

df = pd.read_csv("cc-est2019-alldata.csv", encoding='latin1')