How to unread hide excel sheet in R(read_excel)?

Question

Would like to know is there any method or techniques which can ignore the hidden excel_sheet in an excel workbook (read_excel).

Why i am asking is ,Have many excel files in that many sheets are hidden.

what i have tried so far is referred below link.

How to ignore hidden data when importing from Excel

Appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Here's a function that will inform whatever function you want to use, whether it's readxl::read_excel or otherwise. (I've tested this with a couple of .xlsx files, but nothing extensive.)

This requires the xml2 package.

xlsx_sheet_info <- function(filename) {
  stopifnot(file.exists(filename))
  tmpdir <- tempfile(pattern = "xldir")
  fn <- try(
    utils::unzip(filename, files = "xl/workbook.xml", exdir = tmpdir, junkpaths = TRUE),
    silent = TRUE)
  if (inherits(fn, "try-error")) stop("unable to find 'xl/workbook.xml'")
  on.exit({
    # clean up our temporary directory used to extract the file
    if (dir.exists(tmpdir)) {
      suppressWarnings(unlink(tmpdir, recursive = TRUE, force = TRUE))
    }
  })
  xml <- try(xml2::read_xml(fn), silent = TRUE)
  if (inherits(xml, "try-error")) stop("unable to parse xml")
  # everything we want in sheets is stored as element attributes
  sheets <- lapply(xml2::as_list(xml)$workbook$sheets, attributes)
  nms <- unique(unlist(lapply(sheets, names)))
  out <- do.call(rbind.data.frame, lapply(sheets, function(sh) {
    # I believe attributes will always be 'character'
    sh[setdiff(nms, names(sh))] <- NA_character_
    # return them in-order, safe for 'rbind.data.frame'
    sh[nms]
  }))
  out[] <- lapply(out, type.convert, as.is = TRUE)
  out
}

I created a simple workbook with three worksheets, with various levels of "hidden"-ness: xlSheetVisible, xlSheetHidden, and xlSheetVeryHidden (per Excel VBA enums).

info <- xlsx_sheet_info("Book1.xlsx")
info
#          name sheetId   id      state
# sheet  Sheet1       1 rId1       <NA>
# sheet1 Sheet3       3 rId2 veryHidden
# sheet2 Sheet2       2 rId3     hidden

This is a data.frame, so you can use is.na(info$state) (or grep for "hidden") to choose specific rows, either by name or sheetId (I assume these are monotonic integers, compatible with readxl::read_xlsx and friends).

I would not assume that the order of the sheets is preserved in the rows, as is suggested here. In fact, I created the sheets in order: visible, hidden, very-hidden.