reading shp file with pyshp jupyter

Question

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

import shapefile as shp

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
shp_path = 'seoul\seoul.shp'
sf = shp.Reader(shp_path)
sf.records()[1]

and then finally I got this error UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xba in position 0: invalid start byte

I wanna how to solve this problem

Answer 1

You need to try different encodings options. The documentation shows a way to do it for the shapefile's method Reader:

shp_path = "Barrios_Cali/Barrios.shp"
sf = shp.Reader(shp_path, encoding="latin1") # Notice the encoding option

So go ahead and look for the .shp probable encoding type and give it a try.