How to read UTF-8 files with Pandas?

Question

I have a UTF-8 file with twitter data and I am trying to read it into a Python data frame but I can only get an 'object' type instead of unicode strings:

# file 1459966468_324.csv
#1459966468_324.csv: UTF-8 Unicode English text
df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', dtype={'text': unicode})
df.dtypes
text               object
Airline            object
name               object
retweet_count     float64
sentiment          object
tweet_location     object
dtype: object

What is the right way of reading and coercing UTF-8 data into unicode with Pandas?

This does not solve the problem:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding = 'utf8')
df.apply(lambda x: pd.lib.infer_dtype(x.values))

Text file is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/l1x/nlp/master/1459966468_324.csv

Answer 1

As the other poster mentioned, you might try:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding='utf8') 

However this could still leave you looking at 'object' when you print the dtypes. To confirm they are utf8, try this line after reading the CSV:

df.apply(lambda x: pd.lib.infer_dtype(x.values)) 

Example output:

args            unicode date         datetime64 host            unicode kwargs          unicode operation       unicode 

Answer 2

Use the encoding keyword with the appropriate parameter:

df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding='utf8') 

Answer 3

Pandas stores strings in objects. In python 3, all string are in unicode by default. So if you use python 3, your data is already in unicode (don't be mislead by type object).

If you have python 2, then use df = pd.read_csv('your_file', encoding = 'utf8'). Then try for example pd.lib.infer_dtype(df.iloc[0,0]) (I guess the first col consists of strings.)

Answer 4

Looks like the location of this function has moved. This worked for me on 1.0.1:

df.apply(lambda x: pd.api.types.infer_dtype(x.values))