使用 xlsxwriter 更改要导出的数据类型

Question

So, I've been fighting with what I believe should be a simple problem for the last hour and a half. Essentially, I'm building a list scraped from a website that involves both Names as well as numbers. While scraping them they are stored into a string list. I'm using xlsxwriter in order to build a multisheet workbook with data from multiple webpages. I can't seem to isolate the list items with "numbers" in them and convert them to a floating point. I just started learning Python yesterday so it's very possible I'm just missing something small. I want the numbers to export to the excel sheet as numbers so that they are easier to work with.

I essentially want to differentiate between actual text strings and number strings and convert the strings that contain numbers into floating points. What I've attempted so far is isolating the first character using x[0], x[:0] and x[:1] to test it in an if statement shown below. But when I get to that stage of the code while debugging, it is not actually converting it into a floating point number.

# Function to check if string is number and convert
def checknum(x):
    y = x
    x = x[:1]
    if x in ['0','1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','0']:
        x = float(x)
        return x
    else:
        return y

# How it's being used in my main program
row = 1
col = 0
for tr in soup.findAll('tr'):
    stats = []
    for td in tr.findAll('td'):
        stats.append(td.text)
    if stats:
        col = 0
        for item in stats:
            checknum(item)
            if isinstance(item, float):
                worksheet.write_number(row, col, item)
            else:
                worksheet.write(row, col, item)
            col += 1
        row += 1

Answer 1

One easy way to do this with XlsxWriter is to use the strings_to_number constuctor option. From the XlsxWriter docs :

strings_to_numbers : Enable the worksheet.write() method to convert strings to numbers, where possible, using float() in order to avoid an Excel warning about "Numbers Stored as Text". The default is False. To enable this option use:

workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook(filename, {'strings_to_numbers': True})