pyexcel-xls 0.7.0

A wrapper library to read, manipulate and write data in xls format. Itreads xlsx and xlsm format

pyexcel-xls is a tiny wrapper library to read, manipulate and write data in xls format and it can read xlsx and xlsm fromat. You are likely to use it with pyexcel.

Oct 2021 - Update:

1. v0.6.3 removed the pin on xlrd < 2. If you have xlrd >= 2, this library will NOT read ‘xlsx’ format and you need to install pyexcel-xlsx. Othwise, this library can use xlrd < 2 to read xlsx format for you. So ‘xlsx’ support in this library will vary depending on the installed version of xlrd.

2. v0.6.3 can write datetime.timedelta. but when the value is read out, you will get datetime.datetime. so you as the developer decides what to do with it.

Past news

detect_merged_cells allows you to spread the same value among all merged cells. But be aware that this may slow down its reading performance.

skip_hidden_row_and_column allows you to skip hidden rows and columns and is defaulted to True. It may slow down its reading performance. And it is only valid for ‘xls’ files. For ‘xlsx’ files, please use pyexcel-xlsx.

Warning

xls file cannot contain more than 65,000 rows. You are risking the reputation of yourself/your company/ your country if you keep using xls and are not aware of its row limit.

Support the project

If your company has embedded pyexcel and its components into a revenue generating product, please support me on github, patreon or bounty source to maintain the project and develop it further.

If you are an individual, you are welcome to support me too and for however long you feel like. As my backer, you will receive early access to pyexcel related contents.

And your issues will get prioritized if you would like to become my patreon as pyexcel pro user.

With your financial support, I will be able to invest a little bit more time in coding, documentation and writing interesting posts.

Known constraints

Fonts, colors and charts are not supported.

Nor to read password protected xls, xlsx and ods files.

Installation

You can install pyexcel-xls via pip:

$ pip install pyexcel-xls

or clone it and install it:

$ git clone https://github.com/pyexcel/pyexcel-xls.git
$ cd pyexcel-xls
$ python setup.py install

Usage

As a standalone library

Write to an xls file

Here’s the sample code to write a dictionary to an xls file:

>>> from pyexcel_xls import save_data
>>> data = OrderedDict() # from collections import OrderedDict
>>> data.update({"Sheet 1": [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]})
>>> data.update({"Sheet 2": [["row 1", "row 2", "row 3"]]})
>>> save_data("your_file.xls", data)

Read from an xls file

Here’s the sample code:

>>> from pyexcel_xls import get_data
>>> data = get_data("your_file.xls")
>>> import json
>>> print(json.dumps(data))
{"Sheet 1": [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], "Sheet 2": [["row 1", "row 2", "row 3"]]}

Write an xls to memory

Here’s the sample code to write a dictionary to an xls file:

>>> from pyexcel_xls import save_data
>>> data = OrderedDict()
>>> data.update({"Sheet 1": [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]})
>>> data.update({"Sheet 2": [[7, 8, 9], [10, 11, 12]]})
>>> io = StringIO()
>>> save_data(io, data)
>>> # do something with the io
>>> # In reality, you might give it to your http response
>>> # object for downloading

Read from an xls from memory

Continue from previous example:

>>> # This is just an illustration
>>> # In reality, you might deal with xls file upload
>>> # where you will read from requests.FILES['YOUR_XLS_FILE']
>>> data = get_data(io)
>>> print(json.dumps(data))
{"Sheet 1": [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], "Sheet 2": [[7, 8, 9], [10, 11, 12]]}

Pagination feature

Let’s assume the following file is a huge xls file:

>>> huge_data = [
...     [1, 21, 31],
...     [2, 22, 32],
...     [3, 23, 33],
...     [4, 24, 34],
...     [5, 25, 35],
...     [6, 26, 36]
... ]
>>> sheetx = {
...     "huge": huge_data
... }
>>> save_data("huge_file.xls", sheetx)

And let’s pretend to read partial data:

>>> partial_data = get_data("huge_file.xls", start_row=2, row_limit=3)
>>> print(json.dumps(partial_data))
{"huge": [[3, 23, 33], [4, 24, 34], [5, 25, 35]]}

And you could as well do the same for columns:

>>> partial_data = get_data("huge_file.xls", start_column=1, column_limit=2)
>>> print(json.dumps(partial_data))
{"huge": [[21, 31], [22, 32], [23, 33], [24, 34], [25, 35], [26, 36]]}

Obvious, you could do both at the same time:

>>> partial_data = get_data("huge_file.xls",
...     start_row=2, row_limit=3,
...     start_column=1, column_limit=2)
>>> print(json.dumps(partial_data))
{"huge": [[23, 33], [24, 34], [25, 35]]}

As a pyexcel plugin

No longer, explicit import is needed since pyexcel version 0.2.2. Instead, this library is auto-loaded. So if you want to read data in xls format, installing it is enough.

Reading from an xls file

Here is the sample code:

>>> import pyexcel as pe
>>> sheet = pe.get_book(file_name="your_file.xls")
>>> sheet
Sheet 1:
+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
Sheet 2:
+-------+-------+-------+
| row 1 | row 2 | row 3 |
+-------+-------+-------+

Writing to an xls file

Here is the sample code:

>>> sheet.save_as("another_file.xls")

Reading from a IO instance

You got to wrap the binary content with stream to get xls working:

>>> # This is just an illustration
>>> # In reality, you might deal with xls file upload
>>> # where you will read from requests.FILES['YOUR_XLS_FILE']
>>> xlsfile = "another_file.xls"
>>> with open(xlsfile, "rb") as f:
...     content = f.read()
...     r = pe.get_book(file_type="xls", file_content=content)
...     print(r)
...
Sheet 1:
+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
Sheet 2:
+-------+-------+-------+
| row 1 | row 2 | row 3 |
+-------+-------+-------+

Writing to a StringIO instance

You need to pass a StringIO instance to Writer:

>>> data = [
...     [1, 2, 3],
...     [4, 5, 6]
... ]
>>> io = StringIO()
>>> sheet = pe.Sheet(data)
>>> io = sheet.save_to_memory("xls", io)
>>> # then do something with io
>>> # In reality, you might give it to your http response
>>> # object for downloading

License

New BSD License

Developer guide

Development steps for code changes

1. git clone https://github.com/pyexcel/pyexcel-xls.git

2. cd pyexcel-xls

Upgrade your setup tools and pip. They are needed for development and testing only:

1. pip install –upgrade setuptools pip

Then install relevant development requirements:

1. pip install -r rnd_requirements.txt # if such a file exists

2. pip install -r requirements.txt

3. pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

Once you have finished your changes, please provide test case(s), relevant documentation and update changelog.yml

Note

As to rnd_requirements.txt, usually, it is created when a dependent library is not released. Once the dependecy is installed (will be released), the future version of the dependency in the requirements.txt will be valid.

How to test your contribution

Although nose and doctest are both used in code testing, it is adviable that unit tests are put in tests. doctest is incorporated only to make sure the code examples in documentation remain valid across different development releases.

On Linux/Unix systems, please launch your tests like this:

$ make

On Windows, please issue this command:

> test.bat

Before you commit

Please run:

$ make format

so as to beautify your code otherwise your build may fail your unit test.

Known Issues

• If a zero was typed in a DATE formatted field in xls, you will get “01/01/1900”.

• If a zero was typed in a TIME formatted field in xls, you will get “00:00:00”.

3 contributors

In alphabetical order:

• John Vandenberg

• Peter Carnesciali

• vinraspa

Change log

0.7.0 - 07.10.2021

Removed

1. #46: remove the hard pin on xlrd version < 2.0

Added

1. #47: limit support to persist datetime.timedelta. see more details in doc

0.6.2 - 12.12.2020

Updated

1. lock down xlrd version less than version 2.0, because 2.0+ does not support xlsx read

0.6.1 - 21.10.2020

Updated

1. Restrict this library to get installed on python 3.6+, because pyexcel-io 0.6.0+ supports only python 3.6+.

0.6.0 - 8.10.2020

Updated

1. New style xlsx plugins, promoted by pyexcel-io v0.6.2.

0.5.9 - 29.08.2020

Added

1. #35, include tests

0.5.8 - 22.08.2018

Added

1. pyexcel#151, read cell error as #N/A.

0.5.7 - 15.03.2018

Added

1. pyexcel#54, Book.datemode attribute of that workbook should be passed always.

0.5.6 - 15.03.2018

Added

1. pyexcel#120, xlwt cannot save a book without any sheet. So, let’s raise an exception in this case in order to warn the developers.

0.5.5 - 8.11.2017

Added

1. #25, detect merged cell in .xls

0.5.4 - 2.11.2017

Added

1. #24, xlsx format cannot use skip_hidden_row_and_column. please use pyexcel-xlsx instead.

0.5.3 - 2.11.2017

Added

1. #21, skip hidden rows and columns under ‘skip_hidden_row_and_column’ flag.

0.5.2 - 23.10.2017

updated

1. pyexcel pyexcel#105, remove gease from setup_requires, introduced by 0.5.1.

2. remove python2.6 test support

3. update its dependecy on pyexcel-io to 0.5.3

0.5.1 - 20.10.2017

added

1. pyexcel#103, include LICENSE file in MANIFEST.in, meaning LICENSE file will appear in the released tar ball.

0.5.0 - 30.08.2017

Updated

1. #20, is handled in pyexcel-io

2. put dependency on pyexcel-io 0.5.0, which uses cStringIO instead of StringIO. Hence, there will be performance boost in handling files in memory.

0.4.1 - 25.08.2017

Updated

1. #20, handle unseekable stream given by http response.

0.4.0 - 19.06.2017

Updated

1. pyexcel-xlsx#15, close file handle

2. pyexcel-io plugin interface now updated to use lml.

0.3.3 - 30/05/2017

Updated

1. #18, pass on encoding_override and others to xlrd.

0.3.2 - 18.05.2017

Updated

1. #16, allow mmap to be passed as file content

0.3.1 - 16.01.2017

Updated

1. #14, Python 3.6 - cannot use LOCALE flag with a str pattern

2. fix its dependency on pyexcel-io 0.3.0

0.3.0 - 22.12.2016

Updated

1. #13, alert on empyty file content

2. Support pyexcel-io v0.3.0

0.2.3 - 20.09.2016

Updated

1. #10, To support generator as member of the incoming two dimensional data

0.2.2 - 31.08.2016

Added

1. support pagination. two pairs: start_row, row_limit and start_column, column_limit help you deal with large files.

0.2.1 - 13.07.2016

Added

1. #9, skip_hidden_sheets is added. By default, hidden sheets are skipped when reading all sheets. Reading sheet by name or by index are not affected.

0.2.0 - 01.06.2016

Added

1. By default, float will be converted to int where fits. auto_detect_int, a flag to switch off the autoatic conversion from float to int.

2. ‘library=pyexcel-xls’ was added so as to inform pyexcel to use it instead of other libraries, in the situation where there are more than one plugin for a file type, e.g. xlsm

Updated

1. support the auto-import feature of pyexcel-io 0.2.0

2. xlwt is now used for python 2 implementation while xlwt-future is used for python 3

0.1.0 - 17.01.2016

Added

1. Passing “streaming=True” to get_data, you will get the two dimensional array as a generator

2. Passing “data=your_generator” to save_data is acceptable too.