xlwt write excel sheet on the fly

Question

I am used to creating a spreadsheet in the following way:

    wbk = xlwt.Workbook()
    earnings_tab = wbk.add_sheet(\'EARNINGS\')
    wbk.save(filepath)
         


        

Answer 1

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.

It's perhaps also worth noting that StringIO is replaced in Python 3 by io.