xlsxwriter and xlwt: Writing a list of strings to a cell

Question

I am currently using xlwt quite successfully to create .xls files. I am also learning xlsxwriter for possible future applications where I'll need some of its features.

xlwt smoothly writes lists of strings into cells.

e.g.

import xlwt
a = ['January\n','February\n','March\n','April\n','May\n','June\n']
book = xlwt.Workbook()
sheet = book.add_sheet('Test')
sheet.write(0,0,a)
book.save('Test.xls')

Open the Test.xls file, enable wrap text, and cell A1 shows:

January
February
March
April
May
June

I tried to do something similar with xlsxwriter

import xlsxwriter
xbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('Test.xlsx')
xsheet = xbook.add_worksheet('Test')
xsheet.write(0,0,a)

Here, I get a lengthy error message culminating in

...anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlsxwriter/worksheet.pyc in write(self, row, col, *args)
    416         # We haven't matched a supported type. Try float.
    417         try:
--> 418             f = float(token)
    419             if not self._isnan(f) and not self._isinf(f):
    420                 return self.write_number(row, col, f, *args[1:])

TypeError: float() argument must be a string or a number

I've tried other xlsxwriter write methods and all give roughly similar errors.

Other research: I've searched this site fairly thoroughly. I've also gone through the excellent xlsxwriter PDF and checked the xlsxwriter Github pages. So far, I have not come across anything that addresses this.

Again, xlwt is fine for now I expect to need to add charts and sparklines as well as to create xlsx files in the near future.

Thanks,

The Old Guy In The Club

Answer 1

I've been working through a similar problem.

Was able to achieve the desired result by using enumerate to get the index of each string in the list and then passing that as both the Row reference and the data item to .write:

import xlsxwriter

a = ['January\n','February\n','March\n','April\n','May\n','June\n']

xbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('Test.xlsx')
xsheet = xbook.add_worksheet('Test')

for idx, month in enumerate(a):
    xsheet.write(idx,0,a[idx])

xbook.close()