Pandas seems to ignore first column name when reading tab-delimited data, gives KeyError

Question

I am using pandas 0.12.0 in ipython3 on Ubuntu 13.10, in order to wrangle large tab-delimited datasets in txt files. Using read_table to create a DataFrame from the txt app

Answer 1

I also stumbled upon similar problem. When I was reading as df = pandas.read_csv(csvfile, sep), the first column had this strange format in name:

df.columns[0]

returned this result:

'\xef\xbb\xbfColName'

When I tried selecting this column, I got an error:

df.ColName

returned

AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'ColName'

After reading this I just used my external program Sublime to change the encoding and save the file as a new file (save with encoding UTF-8, but without BOM).

Afterwards pandas reads the first column name correctly and I am able to select it withdf.ColName and it returns correct value. Such a small thing that took 45 minutes to solve.

TLDR: Save file with encoding without BOM.