Problems opening DBF files in python

Question

I am trying to open en transform several DBF files to a dataframe. Most of them worked fine, but for one of the files I receive the error: \"UnicodeDecodeError: \'utf-8\' co

Answer 1

Try using my dbf library:

import dbf

table = dbf.Table('file.DBF')

Print it to see if an encoding is present in the file:

print table    # print(table) in Python 3

One of my test tables looks like this:

    Table:         tempy.dbf
    Type:          dBase III Plus
    Codepage:      ascii (plain ol ascii)
    Status:        DbfStatus.CLOSED
    Last updated:  2019-07-26
    Record count:  1
    Field count:   2
    Record length: 31 
    --Fields--
      0) name C(20)
      1) desc M

The important line being the Codepage line -- it sounds like that is not properly set for your DBF file. If you know what it should be, you can either open it with that codepage (temporarily) with:

table = dbf.Table('file.DBF', codepage='...')

Or you can change it permanently (updates the DBF file) with:

table.open()
table.codepage = dbf.CodePage('cp1252') # for example
table.close()

Answer 2

 from simpledbf import Dbf5
 dbf2 = Dbf5('/Users/.../TCAT_MUNICIPIOS.dbf', codec='latin')
 df2 = dbf2.to_dataframe()
 df2.head(3)