Extract columns from Excel using Python

I have an Excel file with the ff: row/col structure

ID   English   Spanish   French
 1   Hello     Hilo      Halu
 2   Hi        Hye       Ghi
 3   Bus       Buzz      Bas

I would like to read the Excel file, extract the row and col values, and create 3 new files base on the columns English, Spanish, and French.

So I would have something like:

English File:

"1" = "Hello"
"2" = "Hi"
"3" = "Bus"

I've been using xlrd. I can open, read, and print the contents of the file. However, this is what I get using this command (with the Excel file already open):

for index in xrange(0,2):
    theWord = '\n' + str(sh.col_values(index, start_rowx=index, end_rowx=1)) + '=' + str(sh.col_values(index+1, start_rowx=index, end_rowx = 1))
    print theWord

OUTPUT:

[u'Parameter/Variable/Key/String']=[u'ENGLISH'] <-- is this a list?, didn't the str() use to strip it out?

What's the u doing there? How can I remove the square brackets?

Solution

The u means it is a unicode string, it gets put there when you call str(). If you write the string out to a file it wont be there. What you are getting is 1 row from the column. It's because you are using end_rowx=1 it returns a list with one element.

Try getting the column value lists:

ids = sh.col_values(0, start_rowx=1)
english = sh.col_values(1, start_rowx=1)
spanish = sh.col_values(2, start_rowx=1)
french = sh.col_values(3, start_rowx=1)

and then you can zip them into tuple lists:

english_with_IDS = zip(ids, english)
spanish_with_IDS = zip(ids, spanish)
french_with_IDS = zip(ids, french)

Which are in the form:

("1", "Hello"),("2", "Hi"), ("3", "Bus")

If you want to print the pairs:

for id, word in english_with_IDS:
       print id + "=" + word

col_values returns a list of column values, if you want single values you can call sh.cell_value(rowx, cellx).