Read integer from XLS using xlrd

Question

Please find following code that tries to read integer values from XLS files.

import xlrd
import sys

def print_sheet(sheet):
    for row_ind in xrange(sheet.nrows):
        print '\t'.join([unicode(x) for x in sheet.row_values(row_ind)]).encode('utf-8')

f = xlrd.open_workbook('main.xls')
print_sheet(f.sheet_by_index(0))

The example Excel file is as:

1   3
2   4

But the code will convert the integer into float, the output will be:

1.0 2.0
3.0 4.0

Could someone help me keep integers in xlrd? Thanks.