UnicodeDecodeError: ('utf-8' codec) while reading a csv file

Question

what i am trying is reading a csv to make a dataframe---making changes in a column---again updating/reflecting changed value into same csv(to_csv)- again trying to read that csv to make another dataframe...there i am getting an error

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 7: invalid continuation byte

my code is

 import pandas as pd
 df = pd.read_csv("D:\ss.csv")
 df.columns  #o/p is Index(['CUSTOMER_MAILID', 'False', 'True'], dtype='object')
 df['True'] = df['True'] + 2     #making changes to one column of type float
 df.to_csv("D:\ss.csv")       #updating that .csv    
 df1 = pd.read_csv("D:\ss.csv")   #again trying to read that csv

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 7: invalid continuation byte

So please suggest how can i avoid the error and be able to read that csv again to a dataframe.

I know somewhere i am missing "encode = some codec type" or "decode = some type" while reading and writing to csv.

But i don't know what exactly should be changed.so need help.

Answer 1

Known encoding

If you know the encoding of the file you want to read in, you can use

pd.read_csv('filename.txt', encoding='encoding')

These are the possible encodings: https://docs.python.org/3/library/codecs.html#standard-encodings

Unknown encoding

If you do not know the encoding, you can try to use chardet, however this is not guaranteed to work. It is more a guess work.

import chardet
import pandas as pd

with open('filename.csv', 'rb') as f:
    result = chardet.detect(f.read())  # or readline if the file is large


pd.read_csv('filename.csv', encoding=result['encoding'])