UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte

Question

Having trouble loading in this dataset for my Business Intelligence class. I tried a different csv file and that worked. Tried googling some solutions but couldn't figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

# load data

col_names = ['age', 'gender', 'coffee_bags_bought', 'spent_last_week', 'spent_last_month', 'income', 'online', 'new_product']
# load dataset
coffeeStore = pd.read_csv("/content/CoffeeStore.xlsx", header=None, names=col_names)
coffeeStore.head(2)

This is the error I'm running into:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-35-e3969313ee59> in <module>()
      3 col_names = ['age', 'gender', 'coffee_bags_bought', 'spent_last_week', 'spent_last_month', 'income', 'online', 'new_product']
      4 # load dataset
----> 5 coffeeStore = pd.read_csv("/content/CoffeeStore.xlsx", header=None, names=col_names)
      6 coffeeStore.head(2)

9 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pandas/_libs/parsers.pyx in pandas._libs.parsers.raise_parser_error()

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 15-16: invalid continuation byte

Answer 1

You can also change engine parameter to 'python'

coffeeStore = pd.read_csv("/content/CoffeeStore.xlsx", header=None, names=col_names,engine='python')

For more detailed explanation about unicode, utf-8 etc. read this legendary blog post

Answer 2

You're using read_csv on an excel file. Use read_excel instead

coffeeStore = pd.read_excel("/content/CoffeeStore.xlsx", header=None, names=col_names)