This thing is just brilliant! I am working on a project that uses PHP. But I still do my data mangling with Python because of tools like SqlSoup running under SqlAlchemy. Using those under iPython has saved incredible amounts of time. I actually like working with data in this way. It just makes it more fun. Well, I have some data in an Excel file that has multiline text in it. That can be a pain with CSV files. A little digging located a Python Excel writer which had stopped development, with the suggest to use a Python port of a Perl writer, which while cool for writing, has trouble reading… but a helpful post pointed to xlrd. A quick “ sudo easy_install-2.5 xlrd ” later and I was able to do:

import xlrd

book = xlrd.open_workbook("myfile.xls")

sh = book.sheet_by_index(0)

for r in range(sh.nrows)[1:]:

print sh.row(r)[:4]

Sweet. Indeed. All of the Unicode elements and multilines are intact and good to go. Good stuff.

Python Package Index : xlrd 0.6.1

Library for developers to extract data from Microsoft Excel ™ spreadsheet files Extract data from new and old Excel spreadsheets on any platform. Pure Python (2.1 or later). Strong support for Excel dates. Unicode-aware.