[Tutor] How to extract data from text to excel?

[Steven D'Aprano]

tee chwee liong wrote:
> hi,
>  
> i found a module called xlwt (http://www.python-excel.org/) that can write to Excel. i want the code to read from a file (robert.txt) and then write to excel in a column. for eg:
> cell col0, row0 = 0
> cell col0, row1 = 0
> cell col0, row2 = 0
> cell col0, row3 = 1
> cell col0, row4 = 0
> cell col0, row5 = 1
> 
> however, it seems that the output from this code is that it only writes to one cell in the excel.

That's because your data ("robert.txt") only contains one line with one 
field. You read that one field as a big chunk of text, and then write it 
to one cell, and then the loop ends.

> import xlwt
> # Create workbook and worksheet 
> wbk = xlwt.Workbook() 
> sheet = wbk.add_sheet('python')
> row = 0  # row counter
> f = open('robert.txt')
> for line in f: 
>     # separate fields by commas 

What does this comment mean? You don't have any commas in the file 
"robert.txt", and you don't actually do anything with or to commas in 
your code. I think that comment is false.

>     L = line.strip()    
>     sheet.write(row,0,L)    

Here you write the entire contents of the file into one cell. You need 
to iterate over L:

     for c in L:
         sheet.write(row, 0, c)
         row += 1



-- 
Steven