Python: UnicodeDecodeError using pandas.read_excel

Question

import pandas as pd

msf=pd.read_excel('?C:UserspauldufosseDocumentsTESTDANIEL.xlsx', has_index_names=True)

I'm having difficulties importing this xlsx document.

I will give you the full traceback as you might help me to find WHERE the wrong byte is. I'm french so there is the character 'à' but I think this one is taken in charge by ascii/utf-8 am i right?

runfile('C:/Users/pauldufosse/Documents/MSF.py', wdir='C:/Users/pauldufosse/Documents') Traceback (most recent call last):

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreinteractiveshell.py", line 3052, in run_code self.showtraceback()

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreinteractiveshell.py", line 1851, in showtraceback value, tb, tb_offset=tb_offset)

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreultratb.py", line 1240, in structured_traceback self, etype, value, tb, tb_offset, number_of_lines_of_context)

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreultratb.py", line 1157, in structured_traceback self, etype, value, elist, tb_offset, number_of_lines_of_context

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreultratb.py", line 509, in structured_traceback out_list.extend(self._format_list(elist))

File "C:UserspauldufosseAnacondalibsite-packagesIPythoncoreultratb.py", line 547, in _format_list item += ' %s ' % line.strip()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 19: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

That unicode conversion problem in ultratb is obscuring whatever the original exception was that ultratb is trying to display.

Judging by the examples around, you can tell pandas.read_excel what encoding to use by passing e.g. encoding="utf-8" as you would with read_csv.