Dataframe encoding

If you're not using csv, and you want to encode your string index, this is what worked for me:

df.index = df.index.str.encode('utf-8')

Setting up the encoding should be treated when reading the input file, using the option encoding

df = pd.read_csv('bibliography.csv', delimiter=',', encoding="utf-8")

or if the file uses BOM,

df = pd.read_csv('bibliography.csv', delimiter=',', encoding="utf-8-sig")