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

I was also struggling with some weird characters in a data frame when writing the data frame to html or csv. For example, for characters with accent, I can't write to html file, so I need to convert the characters into characters without the accent.

My method may not be the best, but it helps me to convert unicode string into ascii compatible.

# install unidecode first 
from unidecode import unidecode

def FormatString(s):
if isinstance(s, unicode):
  try:
    s.encode('ascii')
    return s
  except:
    return unidecode(s)
else:
  return s

df2 = df1.applymap(FormatString) 

In your situation, if you just want to get rid of the illegal characters by changing return unidecode(s) to return 'StringYouWantToReplace'.

Hope this can give me some ideas to deal with your problems.