pandas-read_excel syntax error

Question

Im trying to read in some data from the second sheet of a excel spreadsheet. skipping the first 18 rows and only columns C to F. This is what I have tried

import pandas as pd

new_file=pd.read_excel("C:\Users\denis\Documents\Dissertation\Raw Data\CO\1213Q1.xls",sheetname=1, skiprows=18, parse_cols=[2,5])

when I run this I get the following error

runfile('C:/Users/denis/Documents/Dissertation/Code/test.py', wdir='C:/Users/denis/Documents/Dissertation/Code')
  File "C:/Users/denis/Documents/Dissertation/Code/test.py", line 9
    new_file=pd.read_excel("C:\Users\denis\Documents\Dissertation\Raw Data\CO\1213Q1.xls",sheetname=1, skiprows=18, parse_cols=[2,5])
                          ^
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

does anyone know what could be causing this?

Does [this](https://stackoverflow.com/a/46011113/9609447) solve your problem? May be you need to add `r` before filename. `pd.read_excel(r"C:\Users\denis\Documents\Dissertation\Raw Data\CO\1213Q1.xls",..)` — harvpan, Jun 15 '18 at 20:51

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 15 '18 at 20:53

You either have to escape the backslashes or use r in front to indicate raw string, i.e.

new_file=pd.read_excel(r"C:\Users\denis\Documents\Dissertation\Raw Data\CO\1213Q1.xls",sheetname=1, skiprows=18, parse_cols=[2,5]))

or

new_file=pd.read_excel("C:\\Users\\denis\\Documents\\Dissertation\\Raw Data\\CO\\1213Q1.xls",sheetname=1, skiprows=18, parse_cols=[2,5]))

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 15 '18 at 21:08

Take a look at this question: "Unicode Error "unicodeescape" codec can't decode bytes... Cannot open text files in Python 3

I suggest not passing a str as the first argument, and instead letting pathlib.Path handle this for you. Also, the docs specify sheetname and parse_cols are deprecated and skiprows should be list-like.

from pathlib import Path
import pandas as pd

p = Path('C:\Users\denis\Documents\Dissertation\Raw Data\CO\1213Q1.xls')
df = pd.read_excel(
    p, 
    sheet_name=1, 
    skiprows=list(range(18)), # skip first 18 rows (0-indexed)
    parse_cols=list(range(2, 6)) # only parse columns 2 (C) to 5 (F)
)

pandas-read_excel syntax error

2 Answers2