Question

I have a file that is really in csv format but is being handed to me as a .txt. I need to take this file and transfer it to .xls format so I can upload it into Google Docs. Currently I have the code below but it is spitting out the file with everything on the line into the first cell instead of breaking out different cells for every comma value. Does anyone know how to solve this?

Thanks!

import os

fin = open(r"C:\Users\JohnDoe\Downloads\Report.txt", "r")
data_list = fin.readlines()
fin.close() # closes file

fout = open(r"C:\Users\JohnDoe\Desktop\Report.xls", "w")
fout.writelines(data_list)
fout.flush()
fout.close()

Answer 1

Just renaming it to .xls doesn’t convert it to an Excel spreadsheet. But regardless, why would you convert it to .xls just to upload it to Google Docs?

If it’s a .csv, just rename the file to .csv and upload it and it’ll properly be detected as a spreadsheet.

Use os.rename:

import os

os.rename("C:\Users\JohnDoe\Downloads\Report.txt", 
          "C:\Users\JohnDoe\Downloads\Report.cvs")

if you really need to do it with Python.

If you need to get actual rows from the file instead of lines:

from csv import reader

for row in reader(open(r"C:\Users\JohnDoe\Downloads\Report.txt", 'rb')):
    # do something with row

will give you a list of cells for each line.

If you actually do need to work with an Excel spreadsheet, see http://www.python-excel.org/ and the xlwt package.