title: UnicodeDecodeError when reading CSV file in Pandas with Python "'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte"
body: <p>I am having having trouble reading a csv file using read_csv in Pandas. Here's the error:</p>
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
  </code></pre>
  <p>I have tried a bunch of different encoding types with the file I am dealing with and none seem to work. The file is from Google's Search Ads 360 product, which says the csv should be in the <a href="https://support.google.com/searchads/answer/1184148?hl=en&amp;authuser=0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">'UFT-16' format</a>. Strangely, if I open the file in Excel and save it as a utf-8 format, I can use read_csv normally.</p>
  <p>I've tried the solutions to a similar problem <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18171739/unicodedecodeerror-when-reading-csv-file-in-pandas-with-python">here</a>, but they did not work for me. This is the only code I am running:</p>
  <pre><code>import pandas as pd
  
  df = pd.read_csv('path/file.csv')
  </code></pre>
  <p>Edit: I read in the file as tab delimited, and that seemed to work. I still don't understand why I got the error I did when I tried to read it in as a normal csv. Any insight into this would be appreciated!!</p>