How to handle such errors?

Question

companies = pd.read_csv("http://www.richard-muir.com/data/public/csv/CompaniesRevenueEmployees.csv", index_col = 0)

companies.head()

I'm getting this error please suggest what approaches should be tried.

"utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb7 in position 7"

Answer 1

Downloading the file and opening it in notepad++ shows it is ansi-encoded. If you are on a windows system this should fix it:

import pandas as pd

url = "http://www.richard-muir.com/data/public/csv/CompaniesRevenueEmployees.csv"

companies = pd.read_csv(url, index_col = 0, encoding='ansi')

print(companies)

If not (on windows), you need to research how to convert ansi-encoded text to something you can read.

See: https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings

Output:

                                       Name              Industry  \
0                                   Walmart                Retail
1                             Sinopec Group           Oil and gas
2      China National Petroleum Corporation           Oil and gas
...                                     ...                   ...
47               Hewlett Packard Enterprise           Electronics
48                               Tata Group          Conglomerate

    Revenue (USD billions)  Employees
0                      482    2200000
1                      455     358571
2                      428    1636532
...                    ...        ...
47                     111     302000
48                     108     600000