title: UnicodeDecodeError: ('utf-8' codec) while reading a dta file in Pandas
body: <p>I am trying to open a <code>dta</code> file with Pandas but get a <code>UnicodeDecodeError</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import pandas as pd
  &gt;&gt;&gt; pd.read_stata('/some/stata/file.dta',encoding='utf8') # I've tried 'utf8', "ISO-8859-1", 'latin1', 'cp1252' and not putting in anything, same error.
  
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;pyshell#123&gt;", line 1, in &lt;interactive&gt;
      pd.read_stata(path,encoding='cp1252')
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 161, in read_stata
      chunksize=chunksize, encoding=encoding)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 960, in __init__
      self._read_header()
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 980, in _read_header
      self._read_new_header(first_char)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 1056, in _read_new_header
      self.vlblist = self._get_vlblist()
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 1127, in _get_vlblist
      for i in range(self.nvar)]
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/stata.py", line 1269, in _decode
      return s.decode('utf-8')
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
      return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x93 in position 18: invalid start byte
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The file contains non-ASCII characters and was saved (probably on a Windows or Mac) by someone else. <strong>R</strong> can open the file and save it as a <code>csv</code>, which I can then read normally, but it would be nice to be able to do everything with Python.</p>
  
  <p>For the encoding argument, following other threads here, I have tried 'utf8', "ISO-8859-1", 'latin1', 'cp1252' and not putting in anything. However, I always get the exact same error.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea what is going on and what can I do?</p>
  
  <p>I'm using Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 14.04 in case that matters.</p>