Pandas - Writing an excel file containing unicode - IllegalCharacterError

Question

I have the following code:

import pandas as pd

x = [u\'string with some unicode: \\x16\']
df = pd.DataFrame(x)

If I try to write this datafram

Answer 1

I don't know this particular language, but generally there is an error with excel and UTF8. If you just open a file of UTF8 characters with excel programatically, it will corrupt them (it doesn't seem to handle all the bits in the character, but truncates it to effectively the first 2 and last 2 hex numbers of the 8 present in extended characters).

A work around, to load a utf file correctly into excel, is to get the program insert a macro into your excel sheet after you have loaded it which imports the data. I have some code to do this in C#, if that's any help?

does your input contain any extended characters (i.e. àâäçæèëéêìïîñòöôœûüùÿÀÂÄÇÆÈËÉÊÌÏÎÑÒÖÔŒÛÜÙŸ) and if you take them out, does it work?