title: Ignore character while importing with pandas
body: <p>I could not find such an option in the documentation. A measuring device spits out everything in Excel:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>    &lt;&gt;    A    B    C
   1
   2
   3
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I delete the "&lt;>" characters manually everything works fine. Is there a way to circumvent that (without conversion to csv)?</p>
  
  <p>I do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import pandas as pd 
  df = pd.read_excel(filename,sheetname,skiprows=0,header=0,index_col=0)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>skiprow = 1</code> does not do the trick since pandas uses the first row as names. If I supply <code>names = list(range(1, 4))</code> the first data row is lost.</p>