How to obtain sheet names from XLS files without loading the whole file?

Question

I\'m currently using pandas to read an Excel file and present its sheet names to the user, so he can select which sheet he would like to use. The problem is that the files a

Answer 1

By combining @Dhwanil shah's answer with the answer here I wrote code that is also compatible with xlsx files that have only one sheet:

def get_sheet_ids(file_path):
sheet_names = []
with zipfile.ZipFile(file_path, 'r') as zip_ref:
    xml = zip_ref.open(r'xl/workbook.xml').read()
    dictionary = xmltodict.parse(xml)

    if not isinstance(dictionary['workbook']['sheets']['sheet'], list):
        sheet_names.append(dictionary['workbook']['sheets']['sheet']['@name'])
    else:
        for sheet in dictionary['workbook']['sheets']['sheet']:
            sheet_names.append(sheet['@name'])
return sheet_names