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I trying to open an excel file from web using xlrd, in Python 3.5.4.

import requests
import xlrd
import urllib

link='http://www.bla.com/bla.xlsx'
request = urllib.request.urlretrieve(link) 
workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(request)  

I'm getting this error.

TypeError: invalid file: ('0xlxs', <http.client.HTTPMessage object at 0x04600590>)

Anyone have a hint?

Thanks!

1
  • Is this xlsx file http://www.bla.com/bla.xlsx really available? Commented Sep 27, 2017 at 0:00

2 Answers 2

2

The urlretrieve returns a tuple, not the url content.

urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename=None, reporthook=None, data=None)

Returns a tuple (filename, headers) where filename is the local file name under which the object can be found, and headers is whatever the info() method of the object returned by urlopen() returned (for a remote object).

import requests
import xlrd
import urllib

link = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SheetJS/test_files/a9c6bbb161ca45a077779ecbe434d8c5d614ee37/AutoFilter.xls'
file_name, headers = urllib.request.urlretrieve(link)
print (file_name)
workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(file_name)
print (workbook)
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Comments

0

Something like this might work.

import urllib2

req = urllib2.Request('http://www.bla.com/bla.xlsx')
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(response.read())

1 Comment

The same functionality exists in Python 3 under urllib instead: from urllib.request import urlopen

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