Writing a pandas DataFrame to CSV file

Question

I have a dataframe in pandas which I would like to write to a CSV file.

I am doing this using:

df.to_csv('out.csv') 

And getting the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03b1' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128) 

• Is there any way to get around this easily (i.e. I have unicode characters in my data frame)?
• And is there a way to write to a tab delimited file instead of a CSV using e.g. a 'to-tab' method (that I don't think exists)?

Answer 1

To delimit by a tab you can use the sep argument of to_csv:

df.to_csv(file_name, sep='\t') 

To use a specific encoding (e.g. 'utf-8') use the encoding argument:

df.to_csv(file_name, sep='\t', encoding='utf-8') 

Answer 2

When you are storing a DataFrame object into a csv file using the to_csv method, you probably wont be needing to store the preceding indices of each row of the DataFrame object.

You can avoid that by passing a False boolean value to index parameter.

Somewhat like:

df.to_csv(file_name, encoding='utf-8', index=False) 

So if your DataFrame object is something like:

  Color  Number 0   red     22 1  blue     10 

The csv file will store:

Color,Number red,22 blue,10 

instead of (the case when the default value True was passed)

,Color,Number 0,red,22 1,blue,10