Unable to open .csv file using pandas (downloaded from outlook); 'utf-8' codec error-CodePudding

I'm trying to download and save a .csv file I receive daily in my outlook inbox. The code saves the file in the a local folder. When I try to access it using pandas, I get a 'utf-8' codec error

import os
from enum import Enum
import win32com.client as win32
from datetime import datetime
import pandas as pd

class OutlookFolder(Enum):
    olFolderInbox = 6

outlook = win32.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(OutlookFolder.olFolderInbox.value)

messages = inbox.Items
messages = messages.Restrict("[SenderEmailAddress] = [email protected]")

t = datetime.today().date()

outputDir = r"C:\Users\ABCD\Documents\ABCD\Daily Seed File"
try:
    for message in list(messages):
        if message.ReceivedTime.date() == t:
            try:
                s = message.sender
                for attachment in message.Attachments:
                    fn = attachment.FileName[:-4]   "_"   str(message.ReceivedTime.date())   ".csv"
                    attachment.SaveASFile(os.path.join(outputDir,fn))
                    print(f"attachment {attachment.FileName} from {s} saved")
            except Exception as e:
                print("error when saving the attachment:"   str(e))
except Exception as e:
    print("error when processing email messages:"   str(e))

fp = outputDir   "\\"   fn

df = pd.read_csv(fp)
df.head()

I'm getting the following error -

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

CodePudding user response：

You could try to use the encoding parameter:

df = pd.read_csv(fp, encoding='utf8')

CodePudding user response：

The file had a UTF-16 encoding and tab or \t separator. The following works -

df = pd.read_csv(fp, encoding ='utf-16', sep="\t")