Pandas' read_excel, ExcelFile, failing to open some .xls files.

I am trying to read in .xls files from http://www.eia.gov/coal/data.cfm#production – specifically the Historical detailed coal production data (1983-2013) coalpublic2012.xls file that’s freely available via the dropdown. Pandas cannot read it.

In contrast, the file for the most recent year available, 2013, coalpublic2013.xls file, works without a problem:

import pandas as pd
df1 = pd.read_excel("coalpublic2013.xls")

but the next decade of .xls files (2004-2012) do not load. I have looked at these files with Excel, and they open, and are not corrupted.

The error that I get from pandas is:

XLRDError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-28-0da33766e9d2> in <module>()
----> 1 df = pd.read_excel("coalpublic2012.xlsx")

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/excel.pyc in read_excel(io, sheetname, header, skiprows, skip_footer, index_col, parse_cols, parse_dates, date_parser, na_values, thousands, convert_float, has_index_names, converters, engine, **kwds)
    161 
    162     if not isinstance(io, ExcelFile):
--> 163         io = ExcelFile(io, engine=engine)
    164 
    165     return io._parse_excel(

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/io/excel.pyc in __init__(self, io, **kwds)
    204                 self.book = xlrd.open_workbook(file_contents=data)
    205             else:
--> 206                 self.book = xlrd.open_workbook(io)
    207         elif engine == 'xlrd' and isinstance(io, xlrd.Book):
    208             self.book = io

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/__init__.pyc in open_workbook(filename, logfile, verbosity, use_mmap, file_contents, encoding_override, formatting_info, on_demand, ragged_rows)
    433         formatting_info=formatting_info,
    434         on_demand=on_demand,
--> 435         ragged_rows=ragged_rows,
    436         )
    437     return bk

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/book.pyc in open_workbook_xls(filename, logfile, verbosity, use_mmap, file_contents, encoding_override, formatting_info, on_demand, ragged_rows)
     89         t1 = time.clock()
     90         bk.load_time_stage_1 = t1 - t0
---> 91         biff_version = bk.getbof(XL_WORKBOOK_GLOBALS)
     92         if not biff_version:
     93             raise XLRDError("Can't determine file's BIFF version")

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/book.pyc in getbof(self, rqd_stream)
   1228             bof_error('Expected BOF record; met end of file')
   1229         if opcode not in bofcodes:
-> 1230             bof_error('Expected BOF record; found %r' % self.mem[savpos:savpos+8])
   1231         length = self.get2bytes()
   1232         if length == MY_EOF:

/Users/jonathan/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/book.pyc in bof_error(msg)
   1222         if DEBUG: print("reqd: 0x%04x" % rqd_stream, file=self.logfile)
   1223         def bof_error(msg):
-> 1224             raise XLRDError('Unsupported format, or corrupt file: ' + msg)
   1225         savpos = self._position
   1226         opcode = self.get2bytes()

XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found '<?xml ve'```

And I have tried various other things: 

```df = pd.ExcelFile("coalpublic2012.xls", encoding_override='cp1252')
import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook("coalpublic2012.xls")

to no avail. My pandas version: 0.17.0

[melikesahin]

Hi, I had faced the same xlrd.biffh.XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; error and solved it by writing an XML to XLSX converter.

import pandas as pd
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def convert_to_xlsx():
    with open('sample.xls') as xml_file:
        soup = BeautifulSoup(xml_file.read(), 'xml')
        writer = pd.ExcelWriter('sample.xlsx')
        for sheet in soup.findAll('Worksheet'):
            sheet_as_list = []
            for row in sheet.findAll('Row'):
                sheet_as_list.append([cell.Data.text if cell.Data else '' for cell in row.findAll('Cell')])
            pd.DataFrame(sheet_as_list).to_excel(writer, sheet_name=sheet.attrs['ss:Name'], index=False, header=False)

        writer.save()

[vermastuti]

@jbwhit I have run the following code:

import pandas as pd
#Read and write to excel
dataFileUrl = r"/Users/stutiverma/Downloads/coalpublic2012.xls"
data = pd.read_table(dataFileUrl)

This reads the file successfully without giving any error. But, it gives all the data in the exact format as mentioned. So, you may have to do extra efforts in order to process the data after reading it successfully.