Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

Extracting the names of columns

In this section, we are extracting column names from the Excel sheet. Create a script called extract_column_names.py and write the following content in it:

import xlrdexcel_file = ("/home/student/work/sample.xlsx")book_obj = xlrd.open_workbook(excel_file)excel_sheet = book_obj.sheet_by_index(0)excel_sheet.cell_value(0, 0)for i in range(excel_sheet.ncols):            print(excel_sheet.cell_value(0, i))

Run the script and you will get the following output:

student@ubuntu:~/work$ python3 extract_column_names.py

Following is the output:

IdFirst NameLast NameGenderAgeCountry

In the preceding example, we are extracting the column names from the Excel sheet. We fetched the column names using the ncols attribute.