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pythonpandasunicodestata

Python cannot export to Stata due to unicode problem?

I'm trying to export a dataframe in Python as a Stata dta. This is a slimmed version of the code I'm using:

import pandas as pd

df_master = pd.read_stata(old_dta_location)

# Do some data manipulation.

df_master.to_stata(new_dta_location, {"final_date": "td"}, write_index = False)

I get the following error when I do this:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u20ac' in position 11: ordinal not in range(256)

I know there are other questions regarding unicode errors but as they are not related to Stata, options such as putting an argument like 'encoding = "utf8"' doesn't work.

How can I fix this?

Solution

  • By default pandas exports to Stata Version 10 (code 114), which does not support unicode.

    Simply specify a later Stata version (118+) to export unicode-columns without error:

    df = pd.DataFrame({'animal': ['€falcon', '€parrot', '€falcon','€parrot']})
df.to_stata('animals.dta', version=118)