Encoding issues while reading/importing CSV file in Python3 Pandas

Question

I am trying to read the Movie Lens dataset: http://files.grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ml-100k/ using Pandas.

I am using Python version 3.4 and I am following the tutorial given here" http://www.gregreda.com/2013/10/26/using-pandas-on-the-movielens-dataset/ ".

When I try to read the u.item data using the code mentioned there:

# the movies file contains columns indicating the movie's genres
# let's only load the first five columns of the file with usecols
m_cols = ['movie_id', 'title', 'release_date', 'video_release_date', 'imdb_url']
movies = pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols, usecols=range(5), encoding='UTF-8')

I get the following error "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 3: invalid continuation byte".

What could be a possible reason for this error and what would be a solution

I tried adding encoding='utf-8' to the pd.read_csv( encoding='utf-8' ), but it didn't solve anything unfortunately.

The error trace back is:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-4cc01a7faf02> in <module>()
      9 # let's only load the first five columns of the file with usecols
     10 m_cols = ['movie_id', 'title', 'release_date', 'video_release_date', 'imdb_url']
---> 11 movies = pd.read_csv('ml-100k/u.item', sep='|', names=m_cols, usecols=range(5), encoding='UTF-8')

/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in parser_f(filepath_or_buffer, sep, dialect, compression, doublequote, escapechar, quotechar, quoting, skipinitialspace, lineterminator, header, index_col, names, prefix, skiprows, skipfooter, skip_footer, na_values, na_fvalues, true_values, false_values, delimiter, converters, dtype, usecols, engine, delim_whitespace, as_recarray, na_filter, compact_ints, use_unsigned, low_memory, buffer_lines, warn_bad_lines, error_bad_lines, keep_default_na, thousands, comment, decimal, parse_dates, keep_date_col, dayfirst, date_parser, memory_map, float_precision, nrows, iterator, chunksize, verbose, encoding, squeeze, mangle_dupe_cols, tupleize_cols, infer_datetime_format, skip_blank_lines)
    472                     skip_blank_lines=skip_blank_lines)
    473 
--> 474         return _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    475 
    476     parser_f.__name__ = name

/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    258         return parser
    259 
--> 260     return parser.read()
    261 
    262 _parser_defaults = {

/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in read(self, nrows)
    719                 raise ValueError('skip_footer not supported for iteration')
    720 
--> 721         ret = self._engine.read(nrows)
    722 
    723         if self.options.get('as_recarray'):

/usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pandas/io/parsers.py in read(self, nrows)
   1168 
   1169         try:
-> 1170             data = self._reader.read(nrows)
   1171         except StopIteration:
   1172             if nrows is None:

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader.read (pandas/parser.c:7544)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._read_low_memory (pandas/parser.c:7784)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._read_rows (pandas/parser.c:8617)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._convert_column_data (pandas/parser.c:9928)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._convert_tokens (pandas/parser.c:10714)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._convert_with_dtype (pandas/parser.c:12118)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser.TextReader._string_convert (pandas/parser.c:12283)()

pandas/parser.pyx in pandas.parser._string_box_utf8 (pandas/parser.c:17655)()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 3: invalid continuation byte

Answer 1

This is a bit of an old one but i'm going toss this here in case anyone else runs into it as I had the same problem in Nov 2018.

I checked the encoding with file -i:

$ file -i u.item
u.item: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Then fed that encoding to pd.read_csv()

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> df = pd.read_csv("u.item", sep="|", encoding="iso-8859-1")
>>> 

Success!