Set PYTHONPATH

To set the enviornment variable PYTHONPATH in bash:
export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/modules

just setting PYTHONPATH=/path/to/modules won't work - you have to use export. If you want a variable passed on to a child processes it has to show up when you type 'env'

But since you used export - next time you start python, '/path/to/modules' will automatically be appended to the front of your sys.path


Obviously '/path/to/modules' should be the full path to whereever you're keeping your modules - something like /home/clayg/lib. (relative path's will work, but not ~/ , probably best to avoid both) You can separate multiple directories with a colon:

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/modules:/path/to/other/modules

Setting python path is handy if, for example, you are using setuptools or distutils to install python modules on a system which you do not have root privileges.

Just download the source dist and find the directory with setup.py, then run:
python setup.py build

Then re-locate the folder with the __init__.py (usually ./build/lib/packagename) to your /path/to/modules folder.

if you want your PYTHONPATH to stick around - you should add it to .bashrc

import packagename should be good to go!

get dates from excel with python xlrd

a1_as_datetime = datetime.datetime(*xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a1, 0))

UPDATE: Please read the discussion of the second argument to xldate_as_tuple - "datemode" in the comments section of this post before using this example. It is LIKELY that hard-coding the "datemode" option will not meet your long term needs.

I had to piece this line together from two other articles, sorry don't remember which.


Full Example:

>>> import datetime, xlrd
>>> book = xlrd.open_workbook("myfile.xls")
>>> sh = book.sheet_by_index(0)
>>> a1 = sh.cell_value(rowx=0, colx=0)
>>> print "Cell A1 is ", a1
Cell A1 is 39811.0
>>> a1_as_datetime = datetime.datetime(*xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a1, book.datemode))
>>> print 'datetime: %s' % a1_as_datetime
datetime: 2008-12-29 00:00:00
>>>

This might make more sense if you're familiar with xlrd - A Python module for extracting data from MS Excel ™ spreadsheet files.

If you are familiar with xlrd, then the only part really worth discussing is xldate_as_tuple, which will convert the float that excel is using to store the date as something more useful, like a tuple:
(2008, 12, 29, 0, 0, 0)

Note that the first argument to the xldate_as_tuple function is the variable I defined as a1. xldate_as_tuple will not accept a cell reference 'a1' or some such thing - you have to give it the float!

The datetime module has a constructor for dates that requires at minimum three positional arguments:

datetime(

year, month, day[, hour[, minute[, second[, microsecond[, tzinfo]]]]])

This would also work:
a1_as_date = datetime.date(*xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(a1, 0)[:3])

You can pass the items of the tuple as positional arguments by prefacing the tuple with an asterisk (wtg python!)