I am used to creating a spreadsheet in the following way:
wbk = xlwt.Workbook()
earnings_tab = wbk.add_sheet('EARNINGS')
wbk.save(filepath)
Is there any way to not save to file to a filepath, and instead write it on-the-fly to a user who downloads the file? Or do I need to save it as a tmp file and then serve that to the user?
Answer
To quote the documentation for the .save() method of xlwt:
It can also be a stream object with a write method, such as a
StringIO, in which case the data for the excel file is written to the stream.
Modified example:
import StringIO
f = StringIO.StringIO() # create a file-like object
wbk = xlwt.Workbook()
earnings_tab = wbk.add_sheet('EARNINGS')
wbk.save(f) # write to stdout
Some may suggest you use cStringIO instead of StringIO, but be forewarned that cStringIO when last I checked does not properly handle Unicode.
Important Update
It's perhaps also worth noting that StringIO is replaced in Python 3 by io.
The StringIO and cStringIO modules are gone. Instead, import the io module and use io.StringIO or io.BytesIO for text and data respectively.
So use:
from io import StringIO
# instead of import StringIO