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

🎈 Using Streamlit
1

I have a CSV with UTF-16 encoding I am trying to upload to streamlit.

I am getting an error for line 18 where I defined UTF-16 encoding so there’s not much more I can do. Here is the line:
with open(file1, newline=‘’, encoding=‘utf-16’) as csvfile:

Any ideas? I can open the same file in notebook so I suppose this is streamlit related problem.

2

Are you saying you have some file1 = st.file_uploader("Choose a file") and are using

with open(file1, newline=‘’, encoding=‘utf-16’) as csvfile:?

If so, note that the file uploader widget explictly returns the file in ByteIO. The with open(...) arugment is looking for a file path/name instead of a file object.

Making an adjustment to the example shown in the documentation, try:

import streamlit as st
from io import StringIO
import pandas as pd

file = st.file_uploader("Choose a file")

if file != None:
    bytes_data = file.getvalue()
    string_data = StringIO(bytes_data.decode("utf-16"))
    data = pd.read_csv(string_data)

    data

Note that something like pd.read_csv accepts a “str, path object or file-like object” so you have some flexibility. I’m not sure what you were going to ultimately do in your with open(..) so feel free to clarify further if needed.