Question

When reading data from excel tables with an xlrd package, the output often has a prefix u’ or something similiar (like, in one case, it had a \u2013 instead of a ‘-‘ character). Why is this and which are the characters i need to look out for, as I’m going to have to parse some information from the spreadsheet cells.

Here’s an example:

>>> wb = xlrd.open_workbook('tellimusleht.xls')
>>> sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0).row_values(5)
[2.0, u'aken sisseavanev, pakett, aluliist, ilma petekata parem', 552.0, 1729.0, 2.0, u'Sp.Barbados 4*6 \u2013 1 maja ']

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

The u denotes a unicode string. \u2013 is the Unicode EN DASH character, which is displayed as –, but it isn’t the same as a regular dash:

–
-  # Notice how one is longer than the other