OpenPyXL always return None for a cell with hyperlink

Question

(My ultimate purpose is to append clickable cells to existing XLSX.)

I use the code below to extract the cell's display value and the hyperlink.

from openpyxl import load_workbook

xlsFile='hello.xlsx'
wbook = load_workbook(xlsFile)
wsheet1= wbook.get_sheet_by_name('mysheet')
cell1 = wsheet1.cell('A1')

print cell1.value
print cell1.hyperlink
print wsheet1['A1'].value
print wsheet1['A1'].hyperlink

But it returns the following things:

URL1
None
URL1
None

Why the hyperlink always None? I did add hyperlink manually for cell A1 and the hyperlink works in Excel 2013.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it's a bug.

It's a bug in 2012...

Some related thread:

Extracting Hyperlinks From Excel (.xlsx) with Python

Some details of my experiment with hyperlink. I am using OpenPyXL 2.3.3.

1. I can add hyperlink to cells.

from openpyxl import load_workbook

xlsFile='hello.xlsx'
wbook = load_workbook(xlsFile)
wsheet1= wbook.get_sheet_by_name('mysheet')
cell1 = wsheet1.cell('A1')
cell1.hyperlink = r'http://www.example.com'
cell1.value=r'XXX'
wbook.save(xlsFile)

2. But I cannot load the XLSX file and read the hyperlink just as my question said.

3. And If I just load and re-save the XLSX file, ALL existing hyperlinks will be lost. Yeah!

from openpyxl import load_workbook

xlsFile='hello.xlsx'
wbook = load_workbook(xlsFile)
wbook.save(xlsFile)

A workaround!

Use the formula with OpenPyXL.

My purpose is to append clickable cells to existing XLSX file. Since hyperlink doesn't work. I use the formula =HYPERLINK(url, displayText) instead. And luckily, the formula is not lost like previous experiment 3.

from openpyxl import load_workbook

xlsFile='hello.xlsx'
wbook = load_workbook(xlsFile)
wsheet1= wbook.get_sheet_by_name('mysheet')
cell1 = wsheet1.cell('A2')
cell1.value=r'=HYPERLINK("http://www.example.com","XXX")'
wbook.save(xlsFile)

Other (failed) options I tried:

I looked into the XlsxWriter. But it explicitly says it cannot modify existing XLSX file. So it cannot be used for appending.

I also looked into the xlrd/xlwt/xlutils, unfortunately, if you want to edit an existing excel, you have to use xlrd to load it as a read-only workbook, and then use xlutils to convert(copy) it into a writable workbook. And BANG! during the copy, something will be lost which includes the HYPERLINK formula. According to its doc string, this is a known limitation:

# Copyright (c) 2009-2012 Simplistix Ltd
#
# This Software is released under the MIT License:
# http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html
# See license.txt for more details.

from xlutils.filter import process,XLRDReader,XLWTWriter

    def copy(wb):
        """
        Copy an :class:`xlrd.Book` into an :class:`xlwt.Workbook` preserving as much
        information from the source object as possible.

        See the :doc:`copy` documentation for an example.
        """
        w = XLWTWriter()
        process(
            XLRDReader(wb,'unknown.xls'),
            w
            )
        return w.output[0][1]

And also, xlwt doesn't support XLSX, only supports XLS. That's another reason I decided not to use it.