Integers from excel files become floats?

Question

I use xlrd to read data from excel files.

For integers stored in the files, let's say 63, the xlrd interprets it as 63.0 of type number.

Why can't xlrd recognize 63 as an integer?

Assume sheet.row(1)[0].value gives us 63.0. How can I convert it back to 63.

Answer 1

Looking at the different cell types in the documentation, it seems that there isn't any integer type for cells, they're just floats. Hence, that's the reason you're getting floats back even when you wrote an integer.

To convert a float to an integer just use int:

>>> int(63.0)
63
>>> int(sheet.row(1)[0].value)
63

Answer 2

Excel treats all numbers as floats. In general, it doesn't care whether your_number % 1 == 0.0 is true or not.

Example: A1 = 63.0, B1 = 63, C1 = INT(A1), A2 = TYPE(A1), B2 = TYPE(B1), C2 = TYPE(C1) You'l see that TYPE() returns 1 in each case.

From the Excel Help:

If value is   TYPE returns 
Number        1 
Text          2 
Logical value 4 
Error value   16 
Array         64 

xlrd reports what it finds. xlrd doesn't mangle its input before exposing it to you. Converting a column from (62.9, 63.0, 63.1, etc) to (62.9, 63, 63.1, etc) would seem like a pointless waste of CPU time to me.

Answer 3

The answer given by jcollado is alright if you have all the entries in the excel sheet as numbers which are integers. But suppose you have a number which is a float you can always put a check condition like -

    if i==int(i): //checking for the integer:
      print int(i)      // solving your problem and printing the integer
    else:
      print i           //printing the float if present

Hope you find this useful :)

Answer 4

I'm reminded of this gem from the xlrd docs:

Dates in Excel spreadsheets

In reality, there are no such things. What you have are floating point numbers and pious hope.

The same is true of integers. Perhaps minus the pious hope.

Answer 5

I've written code which tries to convert numbers to strings as they are displayed by Excel. The approach works works at least for integer numbers and numbers with two digits after a comma. It should work also for many other formats.

The idea, screenshots and code are here: http://uucode.com/blog/2013/10/22/using-xlrd-and-formatting-excel-numbers/