The case of missing rows in pandas

I usually rely on running a wc -l (line count) to do a sanity check on the number of rows in a file (e.g., dataset metadata). Yesterday, I lost an unhealthy amount of time debugging a weird discrepancy between the wc -l output on a CSV file and the number of rows after I read it into a pandas DataFrame. And I learned something new about it. I guess I was one of 10,000 lucky people yesterday. ...

October 31, 2025 · 2 min · Kumar Abhishek