Right, but what if you’re working with a system that doesn’t fully support UTF-8 or has strict encoding constraints? That’s where handling encoding errors with errors='replace' or errors='ignore' comes in handy.
df.to_csv('out.csv', encoding='ascii', errors='replace', index=False) # Replaces unsupported characters
df.to_csv('out.csv', encoding='ascii', errors='ignore', index=False) # Ignores unsupported characters
Using errors='replace' ensures that any problematic characters are swapped with a replacement character (like ? or a similar fallback). On the other hand, errors='ignore' simply skips over anything that can’t be encoded, which might work better in some cases.
Now, what about that second part of the question—writing a tab-delimited file instead of CSV?