python pandas read_excel returns UnicodeDecodeError on describe()

Question

I love pandas, but I am having real problems with Unicode errors. read_excel() returns the dreaded Unicode error:

import pandas as pd
df=pd.read_excel('tmp.xlsx',encoding='utf-8')
df.describe()

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 259: ordinal not in range(128)

I figured out that the original Excel had   (non-breaking space) at the end of many cells, probably to avoid conversion of long digit strings to float.

One way around this is to strip the cells, but there must be something better.

for col in df.columns:
    df[col]=df[col].str.strip()

I am using anaconda2.2.0 win64, with pandas 0.16

Answer 1

Try this method suggested here:

df=pd.read_excel('tmp.xlsx',encoding=sys.getfilesystemencoding())