UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte, while reading csv file in pandas

Question

I know similar questions has been asked already I have seen all of them and tried but of little help. I am using OSX 10.11 El Capitan, python3.6., virtual environment, tried

Answer 1

Can you try using codecs

import codecs
with codecs.open("destinations.csv", "r",encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore') as file_dat:
     destinations = pd.read_csv(file_data))

Answer 2

It's still most likely gzipped data. gzip's magic number is 0x1f 0x8b, which is consistent with the UnicodeDecodeError you get.

You could try decompressing the data on the fly:

with open('destinations.csv', 'rb') as fd:
    gzip_fd = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=fd)
    destinations = pd.read_csv(gzip_fd)