Error in reading u.item file

#1

I tried reading u.item file as: - pd.read_csv(pd.read_csv('./ml-100k/u.item', sep='\|', header=None) -
I got decoding error. Iresolved the issue by passing argument encoding=“Latin-1” -
However I am curious to know what might be the error in the above decoding. I tried bu restarting the kernel also. That didn’t worked.

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#2

Hi @harshsharmajnv_9b70d236614796d5, the UnicodeDecodeError normally happens when decoding an str string from a certain coding. Since codings map only a limited number of str strings to unicode characters, an illegal sequence of str characters will cause the coding-specific decode() to fail.

To avoid this type of situation always try to specify encoding parameter in read_csv function. I mostly use read_csv('file', encoding = "ISO-8859-1") , or alternatively encoding = "utf-8" for reading, and generally utf-8 for to_csv . You can also use one of several alias options like 'latin' instead of 'ISO-8859-1' etc.

Hope this might help :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

Thanks for sharing info sir :).

#4

Glad it helped :slight_smile: for now I am closing this doubt but still if you face any issue you can reopen it any time

#5

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