I have a very large CSV file with many cells that have "\N" as the value. For example:

When I run the function to read the file: pd.read_csv("path")

I get the error: ValueError: could not convert string to float: '\\N'

How can I read a CSV file with "\N" values and have them either ignored or replaced with some default value (like zero or undefined)?

>Solution :

According to the docs, you can use the na_values argument to automatically convert these to NaNs, like this:

df = pd.read_csv("path", na_values="\\N")