title: UnicodeDecodeError Help: Data needs to be in ascii for seaborn but source code is in utf-8
body: <p>Context: I'm trying to build a seaborn heatmap in order to map the following type of data (in a dataframe):</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/NFZAj.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/NFZAj.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>(This can be up to 50 fruits and 5500 stores)</p>
  
  <p>My problem (I think) is that seaborn appears to want to use ascii but my data is in utf-8. When I read the csv file, I can't do the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', encoding = 'ascii')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>without getting the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I bring it in using utf-8, it will read and I can reshape it to heatmap-friendly form but then when trying to run:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sns.heatmap(df2)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get a similar UnicodeDecodeError</p>
  
  <p>I do have simple special characters (colons, backspaces, etc.) in either my store or fruit fields so I'm wondering what the best approach is here.  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Should I run something on my dataframe to remove the utf-8 character
  then encode in ascii?   </li>
  <li>Should I be doing something to my source .csv file to remove the utf-8 characters?</li>
  <li>Can I run seaborn another way to let is accept the encoding I have?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>If anybody has a preferred method, can they help me with the proper code to get it done?</p>
  
  <p>Python version 2.7.12 :: Anaconda 4.1.1 (64-bit)
  Pandas (0.18.1)
  Seaborn (0.7.1)</p>