Reading Excel file with utf-8 python

Question

I want to open and read an excel file with pd.read_excel using utf-8 (so other languages could be read) as in read_csv the encodings can be set to utf-8, is it possible somehow?

Answer 1

You may pass an open file:

with open("file_path", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    pd.read_excel(f)

I didn't find a reference in the docs but a quick look in pandas code suggests "utf-8" might be the default already.