Feature Request: read_excel sheet_name argument

I would love to be able to only read in un-hidden sheets. this could be a new possible value that can be passed to the sheet_name argument.

alternatively, what would also solve my problem is some way to filter the columns (again, probably for sheet_name). ideally be able to use regex or string comparison to choose which sheets to read.

also, what about being able to specify which sheets to be ignored?

[ahawryluk]

@rhshadrach yes, at least for .xls and .xlsx/.xlsm files, checking for hidden sheets is really easy ahead of time:

wb = xlrd.open_workbook('myfile.xls')
sheets = [sheet.name for sheet in wb.sheets() if sheet.visibility == 0]
dfs = pd.read_excel(wb, sheets)

wb = openpyxl.open('myfile.xlsx', read_only=True, data_only=True)
sheets = [sheet.title for sheet in wb if sheet.sheet_state == 'visible']
dfs = pd.read_excel(wb, sheets)
wb.close()

I like your cookbook suggestion; I’ll make a very small PR.

[gfyoung]

@tres-pitt : Thanks for the report! Let me dissect this a bit:

1. Checking for whether a sheet is hidden would be tricky unless we were somehow able to surface an attribute for visibility. Not sure if that’s something we have available, but open to investigation.

2. Your suggestion of regex wouldn’t be particularly hard to add, though I’m not sure how great the use-case would be for such an enhancement. Regex is not a very user-friendly option for most.

3. I’m more a fan of your suggestion to skip sheets. We do this with columns, so I don’t see why we couldn’t do the same with Excel sheets.

So IMO 1 and 3 would be the best ways to go, with 3 being the easiest to implement.