Appending all .xls files in a folder into one .csv file using Python

Question

I have a folder with multiple .xls files that I wanna combine/append into one csv file.

I have script ready for it but the issue i am facing is that the output is not in the same order as the input, if the column names in any of the file is different then, the output has a new column eg:

 Input1                      Input2

col1  col2   col3            col1 col2 Col3
a1    a2     a3              b1   b2   b3

---

Output shown                    Output Expected

col1 col2 col3 Col3             col1 col2 col3
a1   a2   a3   NAN              a1   a2   a3
b1   b2   NAN  b3               b1   b2   b3

---

My current script:

#******************************************************************************************#
#*                        IMPORTING LIBRARIES                                             *#
#******************************************************************************************#

import os as os
import pandas as pd
import time 

start_time = time.time()

#******************************************************************************************#
#             MERGING ALL THE FILES INTO ONE DATAFRAME                                    *#
#******************************************************************************************# 

input_path = os.getcwd()
files = os.listdir(input_path)
files

#******************************************************************************************#
#                        PICKING OUT ALL THE .XLS FILES                                   *#
#******************************************************************************************# 

files_xls = [f for f in files if f[-3:] in ('xls', '.xlsx', '.csv') ] 
files_xls

#******************************************************************************************#
#                    APPENDING THE FILES INTO ONE DATAFRAME                               *#
#******************************************************************************************# 

#Initializing one empty dataframe
 master = pd.DataFrame()

for f in files_xls:
    data = pd.read_excel(f)
     master = master.append(data, ignore_index=True)

#******************************************************************************************#
#                   EXPORTING THE FILE INTO INTERIM LOCATION                              *#
#******************************************************************************************# 

master.to_csv(input_path+'master.csv')


# Printing time taken in seconds
print("--- %s seconds ---" % (time.time() - start_time))    

Incase you need the input then you can find this here (download anyfile):

https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=2009     

Answer 1

Try loading the files without a header and apply a custom one, it should look something in the lines of this:

for f in files_xls:
    data = pd.read_excel(f,header=None,skiprows=0)
    master = master.append(data, ignore_index=True)
master.columns = ['col1','col2',col3']