Why do I face such error when I import data throught pandas?

Question

As a beginner, I am trying to import data with the name of (Facebook_Ads_2.csv) using pandas on jupyter notebook; the output must be as shown below.

but when I import them using the following lines of Python code:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

T = pd.read_csv('Facebook_Ads_2.csv')

I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[4], line 1
----> 1 T = pd.read_csv('Facebook_Ads_2.csv')

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\io\parsers\readers.py:912, in read_csv(filepath_or_buffer, sep, delimiter, header, names, index_col, usecols, dtype, engine, converters, true_values, false_values, skipinitialspace, skiprows, skipfooter, nrows, na_values, keep_default_na, na_filter, verbose, skip_blank_lines, parse_dates, infer_datetime_format, keep_date_col, date_parser, date_format, dayfirst, cache_dates, iterator, chunksize, compression, thousands, decimal, lineterminator, quotechar, quoting, doublequote, escapechar, comment, encoding, encoding_errors, dialect, on_bad_lines, delim_whitespace, low_memory, memory_map, float_precision, storage_options, dtype_backend)
    899 kwds_defaults = _refine_defaults_read(
    900     dialect,
    901     delimiter,
   (...)
    908     dtype_backend=dtype_backend,
    909 )
    910 kwds.update(kwds_defaults)
--> 912 return _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\io\parsers\readers.py:577, in _read(filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
    574 _validate_names(kwds.get("names", None))
    576 # Create the parser.
--> 577 parser = TextFileReader(filepath_or_buffer, **kwds)
    579 if chunksize or iterator:
    580     return parser

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\io\parsers\readers.py:1407, in TextFileReader.__init__(self, f, engine, **kwds)
   1404     self.options["has_index_names"] = kwds["has_index_names"]
   1406 self.handles: IOHandles | None = None
-> 1407 self._engine = self._make_engine(f, self.engine)

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\io\parsers\readers.py:1679, in TextFileReader._make_engine(self, f, engine)
   1676     raise ValueError(msg)
   1678 try:
-> 1679     return mapping[engine](f, **self.options)
   1680 except Exception:
   1681     if self.handles is not None:

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\io\parsers\c_parser_wrapper.py:93, in CParserWrapper.__init__(self, src, **kwds)
     90 if kwds["dtype_backend"] == "pyarrow":
     91     # Fail here loudly instead of in cython after reading
     92     import_optional_dependency("pyarrow")
---> 93 self._reader = parsers.TextReader(src, **kwds)
     95 self.unnamed_cols = self._reader.unnamed_cols
     97 # error: Cannot determine type of 'names'

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\_libs\parsers.pyx:548, in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader.__cinit__()

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\_libs\parsers.pyx:637, in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._get_header()

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\_libs\parsers.pyx:848, in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._tokenize_rows()

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\_libs\parsers.pyx:859, in pandas._libs.parsers.TextReader._check_tokenize_status()

File ~\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python311\Lib\site-packages\pandas\_libs\parsers.pyx:2017, in pandas._libs.parsers.raise_parser_error()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 4001: invalid continuation byte

Any assistance, please?

Answer 1

I assume this can happen because of unexpected symbols in one of the rows.

From the pandas version 1.3.0, there's a handler for these types of errors.

You can try calling encoding_errors parameter in read_csv():

T = pd.read_csv('Facebook_Ads_2.csv', encoding_errors='ignore')

See what does it return, or you can try another type of handling encoding errors

If your pandas version is older than 1.3.0, let me know and we can try to come up with different solution to your problem