Is there a way to encode a csv file to UTF-8 in pandas?

Question

My code: data = pd.read_csv('Downloads/samplefile.csv',low_memory=False, encoding='utf-8')

I receive the error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xd1 in position 258663: invalid continuation byte

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Your data file might NOT be encoded in UTF-8, because the character 0xd1 is Ñ in the encoding ISO8859-1.

So, use the line below:

data = pd.read_csv('Downloads/samplefile.csv',low_memory=False, encoding='iso8859-1')