scienceoss.com » linux

Read Excel files from Python

ryan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:04:25 +0000

Use the excellent xlrd package, which works on any platform. That means you can read Excel files from Python in Linux! Example usage:

Open the workbook

import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook('myworkbook.xls')

Check the sheet names

wb.sheet_names()

Get the first sheet either by index or by name

sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
sh = wb.sheet_by_name(u'Sheet1')

Iterate through rows, returning each as a list that you can index:

for rownum in range(sh.nrows):
    print sh.row_values(rownum)

If you just want the first column:

first_column = sh.col_values(0)

Index individual cells:

cell_A1 = sh.cell(0,0).value
cell_C4 = sh.cell(rowx=3,colx=2).value

(Note Python indices start at zero but Excel starts at one)

Turns out the put_cell() method isn’t supported, so ignore the following section (Thanks for the heads up, John!)

~~Put something in the cell:~~

row = 0 col = 0 ctype = 1 # see below value = 'asdf' xf = 0 # extended formatting (use 0 to use default) sh.put_cell(row, col, ctype, value, xf) sh.cell(0,0) # text:u'asdf' sh.cell(0,0).value # 'asdf'

~~Possible ctypes: 0 = empty, 1 = string, 2 = number, 3 = date, 4 = boolean, 5 = error~~

Check open ports

ryan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:17:23 +0000

Are there any open ports that shouldn’t be open? Check with:

sudo netstat -tupl

Results in something like:


Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address    Foreign Address  State    PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 localhost:mysql  *:*              LISTEN  5077/mysqld
tcp        0      0 localhost:ipp    *:*              LISTEN  5001/cupsd
udp        0      0 *:32768          *:*                      5324/avahi-daemon:
udp        0      0 *:bootpc         *:*                      5875/dhclient
udp        0      0 *:mdns           *:*                      5324/avahi-daemon:

Kill the process that is using the port

kill (PID here)

List open files:

lsof -i

where the -i makes it list internet files.

Split the pages out of a PDF, or merge PDFs into one

ryan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:49:12 +0000

Using the free open source program PDF Toolkit, you can operate on PDFs quite easily.

Install the open-source PDF Toolkit

Get the PDF Toolkit package, available for Windows, Mac OSX 10.3+ (or build from source for earlier Mac OSs) and Linux.

It’s in the Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Split pages from a PDF

To split out pages 10-15 and page 19 of whole.pdf into a separate PDF, piece.pdf, run


pdftk whole.pdf cat 10-15 19 output piece.pdf

Merge multiple PDFs into one

To combine first.pdf, second.pdf, and third.pdf into big.pdf, use

pdftk first.pdf second.pdf third.pdf cat output big.pdf

Other examples here