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')

In many cases you will want to remove the index and add a header:

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