python xlrd unsupported format, or corrupt file.

Question

My code:

import xlrd wb = xlrd.open_workbook("Z:\\Data\\Locates\\3.8 locates.xls") sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0) print sh.cell(0,0).value 

The error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "Z:\Wilson\tradedStockStatus.py", line 18, in <module> wb = xlrd.open_workbook("Z:\\Data\\Locates\\3.8 locates.xls") File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 429, in open_workbook biff_version = bk.getbof(XL_WORKBOOK_GLOBALS) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 1545, in getbof bof_error('Expected BOF record; found %r' % self.mem[savpos:savpos+8]) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 1539, in bof_error raise XLRDError('Unsupported format, or corrupt file: ' + msg) xlrd.biffh.XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found '<table r'" 

The file doesn't seem to be corrupted or of a different format. Anything to help find the source of the issue would be great.

Answer 1

Try to open it as an HTML with pandas:

import pandas as pd data = pd.read_html('filename.xls') 

Or try any other html python parser.

That's not a proper excel file, but an html readable with excel.

Answer 2

You say:

The file doesn't seem to be corrupted or of a different format.

However as the error message says, the first 8 bytes of the file are '<table r' ... that is definitely not Excel .xls format. Open it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad) that won't take any notice of the (incorrect) .xls extension and see for yourself.