pandas: oserror with accent/special character in file path and file name

Question

I am trying to use pandas.read_csv to get data from some .csv files. This works fine as long as there is no accent (e.g. ä,é,ü) in the file name or file path. A

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. It's look like the problem occurs with pandas.read_csv with Python 3.6 in a Windows system.

Python 3.6 change Windows filesystem encoding from "mbcs" to "UTF-8". See Python PEP 529. You can use the command sys.getfilesystemencoding() to get the current file system encoding

I get two solutions around this:

1.- Use this code to change all the app to works with the prior Python <= 3.5 encoding ("mbcs")

import sys
sys._enablelegacywindowsfsencoding()

2.- Pass a file pointer to the pandas.read_csv

with open("C:\Users\MyName\Desktop\dumm12\düm1.csv", 'r') as fp:
        dum1 = pd.read_csv(fp, sep = ";", decimal = ",", encoding = "utf-8")

You can see this post: pandas.read_csv can't import file with accent mark in path