python xlrd unsupported format, or corrupt file.

Question

My code:

import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook("Z:\\Data\\Locates\\3.8 locates.xls")
sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
print sh.cell(0,0).value

The error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Z:\Wilson\tradedStockStatus.py", line 18, in <module>
wb = xlrd.open_workbook("Z:\\Data\\Locates\\3.8 locates.xls")
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 429, in open_workbook
biff_version = bk.getbof(XL_WORKBOOK_GLOBALS)
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 1545, in getbof
bof_error('Expected BOF record; found %r' % self.mem[savpos:savpos+8])
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 1539, in bof_error
raise XLRDError('Unsupported format, or corrupt file: ' + msg)
xlrd.biffh.XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record;
found '<table r'"

The file doesn't seem to be corrupted or of a different format. Anything to help find the source of the issue would be great.

Answer 1

You say:

The file doesn't seem to be corrupted or of a different format.

However as the error message says, the first 8 bytes of the file are '<table r' ... that is definitely not Excel .xls format. Open it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad) that won't take any notice of the (incorrect) .xls extension and see for yourself.

Answer 2

Try to open it with pandas:

import pandas as pd
data = pd.read_html('filename.xls')

Or try any other html python parser.

That's not a proper excel file, but an html readable with excel.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem and it was related to the version. In a python terminal check:

>> import xlrd
>> xlrd.__VERSION__

If you have '0.9.0' you can open almost all files. If you have '0.6.0' which was what I found on Ubuntu, you may have problems with newest Excel files. You can download the latest version of xlrd using the Distutils standard.

Answer 4

This will happen to some files while also open in Excel.

Answer 5

I found the similar problem when downloading .xls file and opened it using xlrd library. Then I tried out the solution of converting .xls into .xlsx as detailed here: how to convert xls to xlsx

It works like a charm and rather than opening .xls, I am working with .xlsx file now using openpyxl library.

Hope it helps to solve your issue.

Answer 6

In my case, after opening the file with a text editor as @john-machin suggested, I realized the file is not encrypted as an Excel file is supposed to but it's in the CSV format and was saved as an Excel file. What I did was renamed the file and its extension and used read_csv function instead:

os.rename('sample_file.xls', 'sample_file.csv')
csv = pd.read_csv("sample_file.csv", error_bad_lines=False)

Answer 7

I just downloaded xlrd, created an excel document (excel 2007) for testing and got the same error (message says 'found PK\x03\x04\x14\x00\x06\x00'). Extension is a xlsx. Tried saving it to an older .xls format and error disappears .....

Answer 8

I meet the same problem.

it lies in the .xls file itself - it looks like an Excel file however it isn't. (see if there's a pop up when you plainly open the .xls from Excel)

sjmachin commented on Jan 19, 2013 from https://github.com/python-excel/xlrd/issues/26 helps.

Answer 9

I met this problem too.I opened this file by excel and saved it as other formats such as excel 97-2003 and finally I solved this problem

Answer 10

I had the same issue. Those old files are formatted like a tab-delimited file. I've been able to open my problem files with read_table; ie df = pd.read_table('trouble_maker.xls').

Answer 11

there's nothing wrong with your file. xlrd does not yet support xlsx (excel 2007+) files although it's purported to have supported this for some time.

Simplistix github

2-days ago they committed a pre-alpha version to their git which integrates xlsx support. Other forums suggest that you use a DOM parser for xlsx files since the xlsx file type is just a zip archive containing XML. I have not tried this. there is another package with similar functionality as xlrd and this is called openpyxl which you can get from easy_install or pip. I have not tried this either, however, its API is supposed to be similar to xlrd.