Pandas seems to ignore first column name when reading tab-delimited data, gives KeyError

Question 1

Sounds like you just need to conditionally remove the BOM from the start of your files. You can do this with a wrapper around the file like so:

def remove_bom(filename):
    fp = open(filename, 'rbU')
    if fp.read(2) != b'\xfe\xff':
        fp.seek(0, 0)
    return fp

# read_table also accepts a file pointer, so we can remove the bom first
samples = pd.read_table(remove_bom('~/datafile.txt'))

print(samples['RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL'])

Question 2

This seems to be (related to) a known issue, see GH #4793. Using 'utf-8-sig' as the encoding seems to work. Without it, we have:

>>> df = pd.read_table("datafile.txt")
>>> df.columns
Index([u'RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL', u'LEFT_GAZE_X', u'LEFT_GAZE_Y', u'RIGHT_GAZE_X', u'RIGHT_GAZE_Y', u'VIDEO_FRAME_INDEX', u'VIDEO_NAME'], dtype='object')
>>> df.columns[0]
'\xef\xbb\xbfRECORDING_SESSION_LABEL'

but with it, we have

>>> df = pd.read_table("datafile.txt", encoding="utf-8-sig")
>>> df.columns
Index([u'RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL', u'LEFT_GAZE_X', u'LEFT_GAZE_Y', u'RIGHT_GAZE_X', u'RIGHT_GAZE_Y', u'VIDEO_FRAME_INDEX', u'VIDEO_NAME'], dtype='object')
>>> df.columns[0]
u'RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL'
>>> df["RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL"].max()
u'73_1'

(Used Python 2 for the above, but the same happens with Python 3.)

Question 3

I also stumbled upon similar problem. When I was reading as df = pandas.read_csv(csvfile, sep), the first column had this strange format in name:

df.columns[0]

returned this result:

'\xef\xbb\xbfColName'

When I tried selecting this column, I got an error:

df.ColName

returned

AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'ColName'

After reading this I just used my external program Sublime to change the encoding and save the file as a new file (save with encoding UTF-8, but without BOM).

Afterwards pandas reads the first column name correctly and I am able to select it withdf.ColName and it returns correct value. Such a small thing that took 45 minutes to solve.

TLDR: Save file with encoding without BOM.

Question 4

I think the issue you're having is just that the "tabs" in datafile.txt aren't actually tabs. (When I read it in using your code, the dataframe has 1 column and 15 rows.) You could do a regex search-and-replace, or, alternately, just parse it as-is:

import pandas as pd
from numpy import transpose

with open('~/datafile.txt', 'r') as datafile:
    data = datafile.read()
while '  ' in data:
    data = data.replace('  ', ' ')
data = transpose([row.split(' ') for row in data.strip().split('\n')])
datadict = {}
for col in data:
    datadict[col[0]] = col[1:]
samples = pd.DataFrame(datadict)
print(samples['RECORDING_SESSION_LABEL'])

This works ok for me on your datafile.txt: the resulting dataframe has 15 rows x 7 columns.