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I am starting to play with pandas.

I downloaded a google sheet.

When reading some data from excel in win7:

xls = pd.ExcelFile('C:/Users/file.xlsx')
data = xls.parse('Sheet 1', index_col=None, na_values=['NA'])
print "Data", data

I am a getting:

Decode error - output not utf-8

The original excel file has text and numbers.

What is wrong?

Thanks,

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2 Answers 2

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Try adding a different encoding argument such as iso-8859-1. Here is an exhaustive list from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Though data may look like legitimate Latin numbers and text, one character could require a different character set, depending on origination.

Also you can either use the two step process, ExcelFile or one-step process, read_excel:

ExcelFile

xls = pd.ExcelFile('C:/Users/file.xlsx')
data = xls.parse('Sheet 1', index_col=None, na_values=['NA'], encoding='iso-8859-1')
print data.head()

read_excel

data = pd.read_excel('C:/Users/file.xlsx', 'Sheet 1', encoding='iso-8859-1')
print data.head()
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3 Comments

thank you for the answer. Unfortunately so far none worked. I will keep on trying.
Try this popular encoding list here. Usually character sets depend on language of file's origin.
Thank you for the list. The google sheet I am importing is mine. I think there might be a format issue when I download it to an excel file on my pc. What do you think?
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This is because, the encoding of your data changes from ASCII to latin1. try this encoding cp1252

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