Encoding in .sas7dbat
read_sas from pandas seem to not like encoding = "utf-8". I had a similar problem. Using SAS7BDAT('foo.sas7bdata').to_data_frame() solved the decoding issues of sas files for me.
I am trying to import a sas dataset(.sas7bdat format) using pandas function read_sas(version 0.17) but it is giving me the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)