Issue when 'equal to' conditional formatting is used with strings

Hi,

I am using XlsxWriter to write Excel files with conditional formatting. The problem I am encountering is that an equals sign is always appended to the value which gets inserted into the conditional formatting configuration in my Excel workbook. This causes text-based conditional formatting rules to not evaluate correctly. Numeric-based conditional formatting rules do not appear to be affected.

I am using Python version 3.6, XlsxWriter 0.9.9, and Excel 2016.

Here is some code that demonstrates the problem:

import xlsxwriter

workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('XLSX Writer Test.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

worksheet.write('A1', 'X')

format1 = workbook.add_format({'bg_color': '#FFC7CE',
                               'font_color': '#9C0006'})

worksheet.conditional_format('A1', {'type':     'cell',
                                    'criteria': 'equal to',
                                    'value':    'X',
                                    'format':   format1})
workbook.close()

After running the above code:

1. Open the Excel file
2. Select cell A1
3. On the Home ribbon, click on Conditional Formatting
4. Double-click on the conditional formatting rule
5. Observe that the value (which was passed as ‘X’ in the code above) is recorded as ‘=X’, which causes the rule to not execute correctly

Thanks!

[jmcnamara]

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed report.

XlsxWriter doesn’t prepend a ‘=’. Excel does that in the interface.

The issue is that the sting X needs to be quoted as an Excel string "X", like this:

worksheet.conditional_format('A1', {'type':     'cell',
                                    'criteria': 'equal to',
                                    'value':    '"X"',
                                    'format':   format1})

After that the sample program should work as expected.

I’ll leave this open as an issue (maybe with a changed title) since the module should probably fix this silently in the background.

Thanks for the input.

John

[jmcnamara]

Reverted due to #564