KeyError when indexing Pandas dataframe

Question

I am trying to read data from a csv file into a pandas dataframe, and access the first column 'Date'

import pandas as pd df_ticks=pd.read_csv('values.csv', delimiter=',') print(df_ticks.columns) df_ticks['Date'] 

produces the following result

Index([u'Date', u'Open', u'High', u'Low', u'Close', u'Volume'], dtype='object') KeyError: u'no item named Date' 

If I try to acces any other column like 'Open' or 'Volume' it is working as expected

Answer 1

As mentioned by alko, it is probably extra character at the beginning of your file. When using read_csv, you can specify encoding to deal with encoding and heading character, known as BOM (Byte order mark)

df = pd.read_csv('values.csv', delimiter=',', encoding="utf-8-sig") 

This question finds some echoes on Stackoverflow: Pandas seems to ignore first column name when reading tab-delimited data, gives KeyError

Answer 2

You most likely have an extra character at the beginning of your file, that is prepended to your first column name, 'Date'. Simply Copy / Paste your output to a non-unicode console produces.

Index([u'?Date', u'Open', u'High', u'Low', u'Close', u'Volume'], dtype='object')