Do not use single backslash
such as newline
\
as it used to escape characters that have special meaning,such as newline
\n
or the error this case \N
(named name in the Unicode).>>> s = "F:\Carrier Bag F\NAV Padget\Padget.csv" File "<interactive input>", line 1 SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 16-17: malformed \N character escape >>> # Fix raw string(r) >>> s = r"F:\Carrier Bag F\NAV Padget\Padget.csv" >>> s 'F:\\Carrier Bag F\\NAV Padget\\Padget.csv' >>> # Or \\ as you see over,other way / also work >>> s = "F:/Carrier Bag F/NAV Padget/Padget.csv" >>> s 'F:/Carrier Bag F/NAV Padget/Padget.csv'