UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python

Question

I\'m running a program which is processing 30,000 similar files. A random number of them are stopping and producing this error...

File "C:\\Importer\\src         


        

Answer 1

Struggled with this a while and thought I'd post on this question as it's the first search result. Adding the encoding="iso-8859-1" tag to pandas read_csv didn't work, nor did any other encoding, kept giving a UnicodeDecodeError.

If you're passing a file handle to pd.read_csv(), you need to put the encoding attribute on the file open, not in read_csv. Obvious in hindsight, but a subtle error to track down.