Iterating over rows in a column with XLRD

Question

I have been able to get the column to output the values of the column in a separated list. However I need to retain these values and use them one by one to perform an Amazon lookup with them. The amazon lookup is not the problem. Getting XLRD to give one value at a time has been a problem. Is there also an efficient method of setting a time in Python? The only answer I have found to the timer issue is recording the time the process started and counting from there. I would prefer just a timer. This question is somewhat two parts here is what I have done so far.

I load the spreadsheet with xlrd using argv[1] i copy it to a new spreadsheet name using argv[2]; argv[3] i need to be the timer entity however I am not that far yet.

I have tried:

import sys
import datetime
import os
import xlrd
from xlrd.book import colname
from xlrd.book import row
import xlwt
import xlutils
import shutil
import bottlenose

AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "######"
AMAZON_SECRET_KEY = "####"

print "Executing ISBN Amazon Lookup Script -- Please be sure to execute it python amazon.py input.xls output.xls 60(seconds between database queries)"

print "Copying original XLS spreadsheet to new spreadsheet file specified as the second arguement on the command line."

print "Loading Amazon Account information . . "

amazon = bottlenose.Amazon(AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AMAZON_SECRET_KEY)
response = amazon.ItemLookup(ItemId="row", ResponseGroup="Offer Summaries", SearchIndex="Books", IdType="ISBN")
shutil.copy2(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])

print "Opening copied spreadsheet and beginning ISBN extraction. . ."
wb = xlrd.open_workbook(sys.argv[2])

print "Beginning Amazon lookup for the first ISBN number."
for row in colname(colx=2):
    print amazon.ItemLookup(ItemId="row", ResponseGroup="Offer Summaries", SearchIndex="Books", IdType="ISBN")

I know this is a little vague. Should I perhaps try doing something like column = colname(colx=2) then i could do for row in column: Any help or direction is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The use of colname() in your code is simply going to return the name of the column (e.g. 'C' by default in your case unless you've overridden the name). Also, the use of colname is outside the context of the contents of your workbook. I would think you would want to work with a specific sheet from the workbook you are loading, and from within that sheet you would want to reference the values of a column (2 in the case of your example), does this sound somewhat correct?

wb = xlrd.open_workbook(sys.argv[2])

sheet = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
for row in sheet.col(2):
        print amazon.ItemLookup(ItemId="row", ResponseGroup="Offer Summaries", SearchIndex="Books", IdType="ISBN")

Although I think looking at the call to amazon.ItemLookup() you probably want to refer to row and not to "row" as the latter is simply a string and the former is the actual contents of the variable named row from your for loop.