Python Xlrd and Xlwt

Question

I have the following content in an old Excel sheet:

I need to generate a new Excel sheet with the following values:

In the input Excel file's 3rd column I have a range 10010-10040 and an increment value of 10. This needs to be expanded in my new Excel file.

If I give a comma (,) in between values, it should be treated as separate values and expanded. (Like in row2, column 3)

I have no idea how to do this and I am new to Python.

Answer 1

Try the following. This uses the xlrd and xlwt libraries to read and write xls spreadsheets:

import xlrd
import xlwt

wb_in = xlrd.open_workbook(r'input.xls')
sheet_name = wb_in.sheet_names()[0]
ws_in = wb_in.sheet_by_name(sheet_name)

wb_out = xlwt.Workbook()
ws_out = wb_out.add_sheet(sheet_name)   # Use the same sheet name

row_out = 0

for row_in in range(ws_in.nrows):
    row = ws_in.row_values(row_in)

    if isinstance(row[2], float):
        req_spec = str(int(row[2]))
    else:
        req_spec = row[2]

    req_range = req_spec.split('-')
    req_enum = req_spec.split(',')

    if len(req_range) > 1:    # e.g. 10010-10040-10
        for value in range(int(str(req_range[0])), int(str(req_range[1])) + 1, int(str(req_range[2]))):
            ws_out.write(row_out, 0, row[0])
            ws_out.write(row_out, 1, row[1])
            ws_out.write(row_out, 2, str(value))
            row_out += 1
    elif len(req_enum) > 1:    # e.g. 1010,1020
        for value in req_enum:
            ws_out.write(row_out, 0, row[0])
            ws_out.write(row_out, 1, row[1])
            ws_out.write(row_out, 2, value)
            row_out += 1
    else:                      # e.g. 10100
        ws_out.write(row_out, 0, row[0])
        ws_out.write(row_out, 1, row[1])
        ws_out.write(row_out, 2, req_spec)
        row_out += 1

wb_out.save('output.xls')  

Unfortunately, if you not familiar with Python there is quite a lot to take in.

The script works by creating an input workbook and an output workbook. For each row in the input, it assumes you will always have 3 columns and that the third one contains one of your three types of specifies. It decides which is in use based on whether or not there is a - or a , present. It then writes out rows to the output based on this range.

Note, when reading the file in, xlrd attempts to guess the format of the cell. For most of your entries, it guesses a string format, but sometimes it wrongly guesses a floating point number. The script tests for this and converts it to a string for consistency. Also xlrd uses unicode u"xxx" format to store the strings. These need to be converted to numbers to be able to calculate the required ranges.