pyexcel-cli - Let you focus on data at command line, instead of file formats

Support the project

If your company uses pyexcel and its components in a revenue-generating product, please consider supporting the project on GitHub or Patreon. Your financial support will enable me to dedicate more time to coding, improving documentation, and creating engaging content.

Known constraints

Fonts, colors and charts are not supported.

Nor to read password protected xls, xlsx and ods files.

Introduction

pyexcel-cli brings pyexcel to make it easy to consume/produce information stored in excel files on command line interface. This library can turn the excel data into a list of lists, a list of records(dictionaries), dictionaries of lists. And vice versa. Hence it lets you focus on data in shell programming, instead of file formats.

Hightlighted features:

1. View data in the excel files without Microsoft Office or Open Office
2. Transcode data among supported excel file formats
3. Merge files in various excel file formats into one
4. Split a multi-sheet excel file into single sheet files
5. Find difference in data between two excel files

Usage

$ cd demo
$ pyexcel view --in-browser --output-file-type sortable.html --sheet-index 0 https://github.com/pyexcel/excel2table/raw/master/sample/goog.ods

Here's what you will get:

Note

You will need to install pyexcel-sortable, which renders it.

Here is another cli example usage:

$ pyexcel view https://github.com/pyexcel/pyexcel-cli/blob/master/tests/fixtures/multiple-sheets.xls
Sheet 1:
+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
+---+---+---+
Sheet 2:
+---+---+---+
| X | Y | Z |
+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
+---+---+---+
Sheet 3:
+---+---+---+
| O | P | Q |
+---+---+---+
| 3 | 2 | 1 |
+---+---+---+
| 4 | 3 | 2 |
+---+---+---+

Because pyexcel family is loosely coupled, especially for file format supports, you install the libraries that you need to. If you need to support xls format, you will need to install pyexcel-xls. For more information, please see the plugin section.

A list of file formats supported by external plugins

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies
pyexcel-io	csv, csvz [1], tsv, tsvz [2]	csvz,tsvz readers depends on chardet
pyexcel-xls	xls, xlsx(read only), xlsm(read only)	xlrd, xlwt
pyexcel-xlsx	xlsx	openpyxl
pyexcel-ods3	ods	pyexcel-ezodf, lxml
pyexcel-ods	ods	odfpy

Dedicated file reader and writers

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies
pyexcel-xlsxw	xlsx(write only)	XlsxWriter
pyexcel-libxlsxw	xlsx(write only)	libxlsxwriter
pyexcel-xlsxr	xlsx(read only)	lxml
pyexcel-xlsbr	xlsb(read only)	pyxlsb
pyexcel-odsr	read only for ods, fods	lxml
pyexcel-odsw	write only for ods	loxun
pyexcel-htmlr	html(read only)	lxml,html5lib
pyexcel-pdfr	pdf(read only)	camelot

Plugin shopping guide

Since 2020, all pyexcel-io plugins have dropped the support for python versions which are lower than 3.6. If you want to use any of those Python versions, please use pyexcel-io and its plugins versions that are lower than 0.6.0.

Except csv files, xls, xlsx and ods files are a zip of a folder containing a lot of xml files

The dedicated readers for excel files can stream read

In order to manage the list of plugins installed, you need to use pip to add or remove a plugin. When you use virtualenv, you can have different plugins per virtual environment. In the situation where you have multiple plugins that does the same thing in your environment, you need to tell pyexcel which plugin to use per function call. For example, pyexcel-ods and pyexcel-odsr, and you want to get_array to use pyexcel-odsr. You need to append get_array(..., library='pyexcel-odsr').

Other data renderers

Package name	Supported file formats	Dependencies	Python versions
pyexcel-text	write only:rst, mediawiki, html, latex, grid, pipe, orgtbl, plain simple read only: ndjson r/w: json	tabulate	2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 3.5, 3.6, pypy
pyexcel-handsontable	handsontable in html	handsontable	same as above
pyexcel-pygal	svg chart	pygal	2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 3.6, pypy
pyexcel-sortable	sortable table in html	csvtotable	same as above
pyexcel-gantt	gantt chart in html	frappe-gantt	except pypy, same as above

Footnotes

[1]	zipped csv file

[2]	zipped tsv file

Installation

You can install pyexcel-cli via pip:

$ pip install pyexcel-cli

or clone it and install it:

$ git clone https://github.com/pyexcel/pyexcel-cli.git
$ cd pyexcel-cli
$ python setup.py install

Development guide

Development steps for code changes

1. git clone https://github.com/pyexcel/pyexcel-cli.git
2. cd pyexcel-cli

Upgrade your setup tools and pip. They are needed for development and testing only:

1. pip install --upgrade setuptools pip

Then install relevant development requirements:

1. pip install -r rnd_requirements.txt # if such a file exists
2. pip install -r requirements.txt
3. pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

Once you have finished your changes, please provide test case(s), relevant documentation and update changelog.yml

Note

As to rnd_requirements.txt, usually, it is created when a dependent library is not released. Once the dependency is installed (will be released), the future version of the dependency in the requirements.txt will be valid.

How to test your contribution

Although nose and doctest are both used in code testing, it is advisable that unit tests are put in tests. doctest is incorporated only to make sure the code examples in documentation remain valid across different development releases.

On Linux/Unix systems, please launch your tests like this:

$ make

On Windows, please issue this command:

> test.bat

Before you commit

Please run:

$ make format

so as to beautify your code otherwise your build may fail your unit test.

License

New BSD License