datetime issue with xlrd & xlwt python libs

Question

I'm trying to write some dates from one excel spreadsheet to another. Currently, I'm getting a representation in excel that isn't quite what I want such as this: "40299.2501157407"

I can get the date to print out fine to the console, however it doesn't seem to work right writing to the excel spreadsheet -- the data must be a date type in excel, I can't have a text version of it.

Here's the line that reads the date in:

date_ccr = xldate_as_tuple(sheet_ccr.cell(row_ccr_index, 9).value, book_ccr.datemode)

Here's the line that writes the date out:

row.set_cell_date(11, datetime(*date_ccr))

There isn't anything being done to date_ccr in between those two lines other than a few comparisons.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can write the floating point number directly to the spreadsheet and set the number format of the cell. Set the format using the num_format_str of an XFStyle object when you write the value.

https://secure.simplistix.co.uk/svn/xlwt/trunk/xlwt/doc/xlwt.html#xlwt.Worksheet.write-method

The following example writes the date 01-05-2010. (Also includes time of 06:00:10, but this is hidden by the format chosen in this example.)

import xlwt

# d can also be a datetime object
d = 40299.2501157407

wb = xlwt.Workbook()
sheet = wb.add_sheet('new')

style = xlwt.XFStyle()
style.num_format_str = 'DD-MM-YYYY'

sheet.write(5, 5, d, style)
wb.save('test_new.xls')

There are examples of number formats (num_formats.py) in the examples folder of the xlwt source code. On my Windows machine: C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\xlwt\examples

You can read about how Excel stores dates (third section on this page): https://secure.simplistix.co.uk/svn/xlrd/trunk/xlrd/doc/xlrd.html