Issue saving data in Excel

Question

I just want save data in Excel, I found this code and it worked perfectly:

import xlsxwriter

# Create a workbook and add a worksheet.
workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('zzzzz.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

date = "17/08/2015"
bill = 001
item = "something"
customer = "Luis"
price = 100

# Start from the first cell. Rows and columns are zero indexed.
row = 0
col = 0

# Iterate over the data and write it out row by row.

worksheet.write(row, col, date )
worksheet.write(row, col + 1, bill)
worksheet.write(row, col + 2, item )
worksheet.write(row, col + 3, customer )
worksheet.write(row, col + 4,price)

workbook.close()

The problem I have are when I try to save info with spaces, if:

customer = "JOSE LUIS FEBRERO LOPEZ"

error:

    >>> 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\crearexcel.py", line 28, in <module>
    workbook.close()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\workbook.py", line 296, in close
    self._store_workbook()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\workbook.py", line 520, in _store_workbook
    xml_files = packager._create_package()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\packager.py", line 140, in _create_package
    self._write_shared_strings_file()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\packager.py", line 280, in _write_shared_strings_file
    sst._assemble_xml_file()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\sharedstrings.py", line 53, in _assemble_xml_file
    self._write_sst_strings()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\sharedstrings.py", line 83, in _write_sst_strings
    self._write_si(string)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\sharedstrings.py", line 110, in _write_si
    self._xml_si_element(string, attributes)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlsxwriter\xmlwriter.py", line 122, in _xml_si_element
    self.fh.write("""<si><t%s>%s</t></si>""" % (attr, string))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\codecs.py", line 694, in write
    return self.writer.write(data)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\codecs.py", line 357, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

I tried to convert to string str(customer) but that doesn't work. The only solution I found are replace spaces " " for "_"

Any idea how I can save data with spaces in Excel?

This all my code, I get all files from folder, later I convert to text, after extract some data and later I try to create a excel file.

I try to coding utf-8 but don`t work

# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from cStringIO import StringIO
import os
import xlsxwriter

# Create a workbook and add a worksheet.
workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('zzzzz.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

files = [f for f in os.listdir('.') if os.path.isfile(f)]
for f in files:

    z = 0

e = (len(files) - 1)



def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    fp = file(path, 'rb')
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    password = ""
    maxpages = 0
    caching = True
    pagenos=set()
    fstr = ''
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages,    password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):
        interpreter.process_page(page)

        str = retstr.getvalue()
        fstr += str

    fp.close()
    device.close()
    retstr.close()
    return fstr

row = 0
col = 0

while z<e:    

    factura = files[z]
    #ejemplo 1

    string = convert_pdf_to_txt(factura)
    lines = list(filter(bool,string.split('\n')))
    custData = {}
    for i in range(len(lines)):
        if 'EMAIL:' in lines[i]:
            custData['Name'] = lines[i+1]
        elif 'FACTURA' in lines[i]:
            custData['BillNumber'] = lines[i+1]
        elif 'Vencimientos:' in lines[i]:
            custData['price'] = lines[i+2]
        elif 'Banco:' in lines[i]:
            custData['paymentType'] = lines[i+1]



    #ejemplo 2
    txtList = convert_pdf_to_txt(factura).splitlines()
    nameIdx, billNumIdx, priceIdx, expirDateIdx, paymentIdx = -1, -1, -1, -1, -1

    for idx, line in enumerate(txtList):
        if line == "EMAIL: [email protected]":
            nameIdx = idx +2 # in your example it should be +2...

        if line == "FACTURA":
            billNumIdx = idx + 1

        if "Vencimientos:" in line:
            priceIdx = idx + 2
            expirDateIdx = idx + 1

        if "Banco:" in line:
            paymentIdx = idx + 1

    name = txtList[nameIdx] if nameIdx != -1 else ''
    billNum = txtList[billNumIdx] if billNumIdx != -1 else ''
    price = txtList[priceIdx] if priceIdx != -1 else ''
    expirDate = txtList[expirDateIdx] if expirDateIdx != -1 else ''
    payment = txtList[paymentIdx] if paymentIdx != -1 else ''


    print expirDate

    billNum = billNum.replace("  ", "")


    print billNum


    custData['Name'] = custData['Name'].replace("Â", "")

    print custData['Name']


    custData['paymentType'] = custData['paymentType'].replace("Â", "")

    print custData['paymentType']

    print price
    nombre = str(custData['Name'])


    formadepago = custData['paymentType']

    z+=1
    columna2 = str(billNum) + ", " + nombre + ", " + formadepago



    worksheet.write(row, col, expirDate)
    worksheet.write(row, col + 1, columna2) 
    worksheet.write(row, col + 2, price)
    row+=1

workbook.close()    

Hi, I add this code after all import.... and now I'm able to save nonbreaking space.

import sys
reload(sys)  
sys.setdefaultencoding('Cp1252')

Answer 1

sys.setdefaultencoding('Cp1252') - this is a nasty fix-all hack. It masks other issues and makes your code brittle and platform specific.

"JOSE LUIS FEBRERO LOPEZ" contains a Windows-1252 encoded Non-breaking space (0xA0).

xlsxwriter requires that you pass Unicode objects when using non-ASCII characters. In fact, it's good practice to use Unicode objects for all strings.

Create a Unicode object by appending a u to the front of the string:

u"JOSE LUIS FEBRERO LOPEZ"

As your Python source code is encoded as Windows-1252, you will need to add the following to the top of your source file:

# coding=cp1252

This will tell Python how to decode the strings in your source file into Unicode objects.