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Trouble handling UnicodeDecodeError with CSV files in Python 2.7

👀 Views: 39 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-14
python-2.7 csv unicode encoding Python

I'm working on a data processing script in Python 2.7 where I'm trying to read a CSV file that contains some non-ASCII characters. When I attempt to read the file using the `csv` module, I run into a `UnicodeDecodeError` that says `UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec need to decode byte 0xe2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)`. I've tried specifying the encoding while opening the file, but I still need to seem to get it to work properly. Here's the relevant part of my code: ```python import csv with open('data.csv', 'rb') as csvfile: reader = csv.reader(csvfile) for row in reader: print(row) ``` I also tried using `codecs` to open the file: ```python import codecs with codecs.open('data.csv', 'r', 'utf-8') as csvfile: reader = csv.reader(csvfile) for row in reader: print(row) ``` However, I still get the same behavior. I'm not sure if the question lies in the file encoding or how I'm trying to read it. I've confirmed that the CSV file is indeed encoded in UTF-8, but I'm not able to parse it correctly. Additionally, I’m using the `csv` module from Python's standard library and I’ve also checked if there are any BOM markers present but didn’t find any. How can I resolve this scenario and successfully read the CSV file? Any suggestions on best practices for handling such files in Python 2.7 would be greatly appreciated.