Reading contents of excel file in python webapp2

Question

I have two files namely sample.csv and sample.xlsx, all those files are stored in blobstore.I am able to read the records of csv file(which is in the blobstore) using the following code

   blobReader = blobstore.BlobReader(blob_key)
   inputFile = BlobIterator(blobReader)
   if inputFile is None:
      values = None
   else:
      try:
         stringReader = csv.reader(inputFile)
         data = []
         columnHeaders = []
         for rowIndex, row in enumerate(stringReader):
            if(rowIndex == 0):
               columnHeaders = row
            else:
               data.append(row)
         values = {'columnHeaders' : columnHeaders, 'data' : data}
      except:
         values = None

      self.response.write(values) 

The output of the above code of a sample.csv file is

{'columnHeaders': ['First Name', 'Last Name', 'Email', 'Mobile'], 'data': [['fx1', 'lx2', '[e-mail]', 'xxx-xxx-xxxx'], ['fy1', 'ly2', '[e-mail]', 'yyy-yyy-yyyy'], ['fz1', 'lz2', '[e-mail]', 'zzz-zzz-zzzz']]}   

Using the xlrd package, i am able to read the excel file contents, but in this i have to specify the exact file location

   book = xlrd.open_workbook('D:/sample.xlsx') 
   first_sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0)
   self.response.write(first_sheet.row_values(0)) 
   cell = first_sheet.cell(0,0) 
   self.response.write(cell.value) 

Is there any way to read the excel file contents from the blobstore, i have tried it with the following code

   blobReader = blobstore.BlobReader(blobKey)
   uploadedFile = BlobIterator(blobReader) 
   book = xlrd.open_workbook(file_contents=uploadedFile)
                    (or)
   book = xlrd.open_workbook(file_contents=blobReader)

But it throws some error TypeError: 'BlobReader' object has no attribute 'getitem'.

Any ideas? Thanks..

Answer 1

Looking into the doc for open_workbook in the xlrd package doc, it seems that when you pass "file_contents", it's expecting a string.

Then you need to look into turning a Blob into a String, which can be done with BlobReader.read(), which gives you a string of the read data.