Excel and lists with Python

Question

I am treating Excel sheets using Python. I wrote this :

import xlrd
wb=xlrd.open_workbook('C:\\Inputs_UNF_newForm.xlsx')
s=wb.sheet_by_name('Chemical treatments')

def getOutputs(s):
    for row_index in range(28):
        v = s.cell_value(row_index, 1)
        if s.cell_value(row_index, 1) != "" :
            print ('"'+v +'"'+","),

getOutputs(s)

It works just fine. (Well, except that there is still a coma after the last word..) The thing is, I need to create a list of the result of the getOuputs fonction, ie. a list of the cells I read.

I did this:

OutputList=[getOutputs(s)]
print OutputList[1]

But it didn't work. What am I missing? (The extra coma?)

`getOutputs` *doesn't return anything* (or rather, will implicitly return `None`), so you should not be surprised by this. Even if it *did* return something, there would **never** be an `OutputList[1]`, because list indices are zero-based. — jonrsharpe, Feb 25 '15 at 14:52

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 25 '15 at 14:54

The problem is that you are just printing the values instead of returning them. Here I use an originally empty list keep and append the values to the keep list, then return that list to the caller.

def getOutputs(s):
    keep = []
    for row_index in range(28):
        v = s.cell_value(row_index, 1)
        if v != "" :
            keep.append(v)
    return keep

On a side note, an easy way to deal with printing the values without the trailing comma would then be `print(",".join(OutputList)).

Thank you for your return. I used your solution and I added a `print(getOuputs(s)` and got `[u'item1', u'item2', u'item3']` What does the 'u' mean? — AmyMagoria, Feb 25 '15 at 15:06

Excel and lists with Python

1 Answers1