From adb091808b999fe5b6d3941bd5043ca861934b29 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Adrian Castravete <adrian@figshare.com>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2018 15:38:36 +0300
Subject: [PATCH] BUG: Fix handling of encoding for the StataReader #21244

---
 pandas/io/stata.py | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/pandas/io/stata.py b/pandas/io/stata.py
index 8f91c7a497e2d0..269047c28b54ba 100644
--- a/pandas/io/stata.py
+++ b/pandas/io/stata.py
@@ -1335,7 +1335,7 @@ def _calcsize(self, fmt):
 
     def _decode(self, s):
         s = s.partition(b"\0")[0]
-        return s.decode('utf-8')
+        return s.decode(self._encoding or self._default_encoding)
 
     def _null_terminate(self, s):
         if compat.PY3 or self._encoding is not None: