convert xldate to python datetime

Question

I have a problem converting excel xldate to python datetime with the following code. Is this the right way to convert?

import xlrd
from datetime import datetime

book = xlrd.open_workbook("a.xls")
sh = book.sheet_by_index(0)
for rx in range(1,sh.nrows):
    a = sh.row(rx)
    print a  
    year, month, day, hour, minute = xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a[0], book.datemode)
    py_date = datetime.datetime(year, month, day, hour, minute)

---

a is printed -->

   [xldate:40544.0, number:0.0, number:75.49847785316135, number:75.6401124106301]

---

The below error is shown

  year, month, day, hour, minute = xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a[0], book.datemode)

  File "C:\Anaconda\Lib\site-packages\xlrd\xldate.py", line 67, in xldate_as_tuple
    xldays = int(xldate)
  TypeError: int() argument must be a string or a number, not 'Cell'

Answer 1

a[0] is a xlrd.Cell, so you need to use a[0].value to access the cell content.

Also, you can't unpack to year, month, day, hour, minute because there are more than five values in the tuple produced (what about second?) However, you can avoid that by using tuple unpacking (see e.g. What does ** (double star) and * (star) do for parameters?) instead of the temporary variables:

py_date = datetime.datetime(*xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a[0].value,
                                                  book.datemode))

Answer 2

@jonrsharpe's accepted answer works well. But this is cleaner:

py_date = xlrd.xldate.xldate_as_datetime(a[0].value, book.datemode)