title: How to read UTF-8 files with Pandas?
body: <p>I have a UTF-8 file with twitter data and I am trying to read it into a Python data frame but I can only get an 'object' type instead of unicode strings:</p>
  
  <pre><code># file 1459966468_324.csv
  #1459966468_324.csv: UTF-8 Unicode English text
  df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', dtype={'text': unicode})
  df.dtypes
  text               object
  Airline            object
  name               object
  retweet_count     float64
  sentiment          object
  tweet_location     object
  dtype: object
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the right way of reading and coercing UTF-8 data into unicode with Pandas?</p>
  
  <p>This does not solve the problem:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df = pd.read_csv('1459966468_324.csv', encoding = 'utf8')
  df.apply(lambda x: pd.lib.infer_dtype(x.values))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Text file is here:
  <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/l1x/nlp/master/1459966468_324.csv" rel="noreferrer">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/l1x/nlp/master/1459966468_324.csv</a></p>