XLRD/Python: Reading Excel file into dict with for-loops

Question

I\'m looking to read in an Excel workbook with 15 fields and about 2000 rows, and convert each row to a dictionary in Python. I then want to append each dictionary to a list

Answer 1

The idea is to, first, read the header into the list. Then, iterate over the sheet rows (starting from the next after the header), create new dictionary based on header keys and appropriate cell values and append it to the list of dictionaries:

from xlrd import open_workbook

book = open_workbook('forum.xlsx')
sheet = book.sheet_by_index(3)

# read header values into the list    
keys = [sheet.cell(0, col_index).value for col_index in xrange(sheet.ncols)]

dict_list = []
for row_index in xrange(1, sheet.nrows):
    d = {keys[col_index]: sheet.cell(row_index, col_index).value 
         for col_index in xrange(sheet.ncols)}
    dict_list.append(d)

print dict_list

For a sheet containing:

A   B   C   D
1   2   3   4
5   6   7   8

it prints:

[{'A': 1.0, 'C': 3.0, 'B': 2.0, 'D': 4.0}, 
 {'A': 5.0, 'C': 7.0, 'B': 6.0, 'D': 8.0}]

UPD (expanding the dictionary comprehension):

d = {}
for col_index in xrange(sheet.ncols):
    d[keys[col_index]] = sheet.cell(row_index, col_index).value