I cleaned 400 excel files and read them into python using pandas and appended all the raw data into one big df.
Then when I try to export it to a csv:
df.to_csv("path",header=True,index=False)
I get this error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc7' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)
Can someone suggest a way to fix this and what it means?
Thanks
You have unicode
values in your DataFrame. Files store bytes, which means all unicode
have to be encoded into bytes before they can be stored in a file. You have to specify an encoding, such as utf-8
. For example,
df.to_csv('path', header=True, index=False, encoding='utf-8')
If you don't specify an encoding, then the encoding used by df.to_csv
defaults to ascii
in Python2, or utf-8
in Python3.