Pandas: reading Excel file starting from the row below that with a specific value

Question

Say I have the following Excel file:

    A      B     C
0   -      -     -
1   Start  -     -
2   3      2     4
3   7      8     4
4   11     2     17

I want to read the file in a dataframe making sure that I start to read it below the row where the Start value is.

Attention: the Start value is not always located in the same row, so if I were to use:

import pandas as pd
xls = pd.ExcelFile('C:\Users\MyFolder\MyFile.xlsx')
df = xls.parse('Sheet1', skiprows=4, index_col=None)

this would fail as skiprows needs to be fixed. Is there any workaround to make sure that xls.parse finds the string value instead of the row number?

Answer 1

df = pd.read_excel('your/path/filename')

This answer helps in finding the location of 'start' in the df

 for row in range(df.shape[0]): 

       for col in range(df.shape[1]):

           if df.iat[row,col] == 'start':

             row_start = row
             break

after having row_start you can use subframe of pandas

df_required = df.loc[row_start:]

And if you don't need the row containing 'start', just u increment row_start by 1

df_required = df.loc[row_start+1:]

Answer 2

If you know the specific rows you are interested in, you can skip from the top using skiprow and then parse only the row (or rows) you want using nrows - see pandas.read_excel

df = pd.read_excel('myfile.xlsx', 'Sheet1', skiprows=2, nrows=3,)

Answer 3

You could use pd.read_excel('C:\Users\MyFolder\MyFile.xlsx', sheet_name='Sheet1') as it ignores empty excel cells.

Your DataFrame should then look like this:

    A      B     C
0   Start NaN   NaN
1   3      2     4
2   7      8     4
3   11     2     17

Then drop the first row by using

df.drop([0])

to get

    A      B     C
0   3      2     4
1   7      8     4
2   11     2     17