Importing TSV file and getting an error message

[Hmickelson8 (Hollie Mickelson)]

Hello,
I am trying to import my TSV file and I keep getting these error messages.

There was a problem importing SequenceSamples.tsv:

SequenceSamples.tsv is not a(n) SingleEndFastqManifestPhred33V2 file:

Metadata file must be encoded as UTF-8 or ASCII. The following error occurred when decoding the file:

'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 15-16: invalid continuation byte

here is my command thread used

qiime tools import
--type 'SampleData[SequencesWithQuality]'
--input-path SequenceSamples.tsv
--output-path single-end-demux.qza
--input-format SingleEndFastqManifestPhred33V2

looking through the home directory, this file is in the folder, condo and qiime2 are active and I did save the file as TSV with $PWD in front. What am I doing wrong?

[jwdebelius (Justine Debelius)]

Welcome to the forum!

@Hmickelson8

looking through the home directory, this file is in the folder, condo and qiime2 are active and I did save the file as TSV with $PWD in front.

It looks like you've done a lot of the standard trouble shooting up front ! But, the error is telling you ssomething different:

@Hmickelson8

Metadata file must be encoded as UTF-8 or ASCII. The following error occurred when decoding the file:

utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 15-16: invalid continuation byte

You've got a non-UTF-8/non-ASCII character. The UTF-8 character set is pretty limited and pretty US-centric, so if you have characters with accents, umlats, tildes, (i.e. ü, å, ñ, á), the naming will fail. it looks like a problem relatively early in the file.

Best,
Justine