python - Pandas read _excel: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Question

Trying to read MS Excel file, version 2016. File contains several lists with data. File downloaded from DataBase and it can be opened in MS Office correctly. In example below I changed the file name.

EDIT: file contains russian and english words. Most probably used the Latin-1 encoding, but encoding='latin-1' does not help

import pandas as pd
with open('1.xlsx', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
        data = pd.read_excel(f)

Result:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte

Without encoding ='utf8'

'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 622: character maps to <undefined>

P.S. Task is to process 52 files, to merge data in every sheet with corresponded sheets in the 52 files. So, please no handle work advices.

Answer 1

The problem is that the original requester is calling read_excel with a filehandle as the first argument. As demonstrated by the last responder, the first argument should be a string containing the filename.

I ran into this same error using:

df = pd.read_excel(open("file.xlsx",'r'))

but correct is:

df = pd.read_excel("file.xlsx")