How to remove illegal characters so a dataframe can write to Excel

Question

I am trying to write a dataframe to an Excel spreadsheet using ExcelWriter, but it keeps returning an error:

openpyxl.utils.exceptions.IllegalCharacterError
         


        

Answer 1

Based on Haipeng Su's answer, I added a function that does this:

dataframe = dataframe.applymap(lambda x: x.encode('unicode_escape').
                 decode('utf-8') if isinstance(x, str) else x)

Basically, it escapes the unicode characters if they exist. It worked and I can now write to Excel spreadsheets again!