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

The issue hasn't been resolved till now. Wait till a PR. Or try it with Python 2.7 I guess that might work

Answer 2

I tested the name in creating a fake file 'düm1.csv'.

when I run :

df = pd.read_csv('düm1.csv',sep=';')

I haven't an OSError and the file is open in my Ipython.

   Unnamed: 0  test1  test2  test3  tes4
0         NaN    1.0    2.0    3.0   4.0
1         NaN    NaN    NaN    NaN   NaN
2         NaN    NaN    NaN    NaN   NaN
3         NaN    NaN    NaN    NaN   NaN
4         NaN    NaN    NaN    NaN   NaN

Have you tried without encoding ? Without accent ?

C.

Answer 3

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