Download a spreadsheet from Google Docs using Python

Question

Can you produce a Python example of how to download a Google Docs spreadsheet given its key and worksheet ID (gid)? I can't.

I've scoured versions 1, 2 and 3 of the API. I'm having no luck, I can't figure out their compilcated ATOM-like feeds API, the gdata.docs.service.DocsService._DownloadFile private method says that I'm unauthorized, and I don't want to write an entire Google Login authentication system myself. I'm about to stab myself in the face due to frustration.

I have a few spreadsheets and I want to access them like so:

username = '[email protected]'
password = getpass.getpass()

def get_spreadsheet(key, gid=0):
    ... (help!) ...

for row in get_spreadsheet('5a3c7f7dcee4b4f'):
    cell1, cell2, cell3 = row
    ...

Please save my face.

---

Update 1: I've tried the following, but no combination of Download() or Export() seems to work. (Docs for DocsService here)

import gdata.docs.service
import getpass
import os
import tempfile
import csv

def get_csv(file_path):
  return csv.reader(file(file_path).readlines())

def get_spreadsheet(key, gid=0):
  gd_client = gdata.docs.service.DocsService()
  gd_client.email = '[email protected]'
  gd_client.password = getpass.getpass()
  gd_client.ssl = False
  gd_client.source = "My Fancy Spreadsheet Downloader"
  gd_client.ProgrammaticLogin()

  file_path = tempfile.mktemp(suffix='.csv')
  uri = 'http://docs.google.com/feeds/documents/private/full/%s' % key
  try:
    entry = gd_client.GetDocumentListEntry(uri)

    # XXXX - The following dies with RequestError "Unauthorized"
    gd_client.Download(entry, file_path)

    return get_csv(file_path)
  finally:
    try:
      os.remove(file_path)
    except OSError:
      pass

Solution 1

In case anyone comes across this looking for a quick fix, here's another (currently) working solution that doesn't rely on the gdata client library:

#!/usr/bin/python

import re, urllib, urllib2

class Spreadsheet(object):
    def __init__(self, key):
        super(Spreadsheet, self).__init__()
        self.key = key

class Client(object):
    def __init__(self, email, password):
        super(Client, self).__init__()
        self.email = email
        self.password = password

    def _get_auth_token(self, email, password, source, service):
        url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin"
        params = {
            "Email": email, "Passwd": password,
            "service": service,
            "accountType": "HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE",
            "source": source
        }
        req = urllib2.Request(url, urllib.urlencode(params))
        return re.findall(r"Auth=(.*)", urllib2.urlopen(req).read())[0]

    def get_auth_token(self):
        source = type(self).__name__
        return self._get_auth_token(self.email, self.password, source, service="wise")

    def download(self, spreadsheet, gid=0, format="csv"):
        url_format = "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Export?key=%s&exportFormat=%s&gid=%i"
        headers = {
            "Authorization": "GoogleLogin auth=" + self.get_auth_token(),
            "GData-Version": "3.0"
        }
        req = urllib2.Request(url_format % (spreadsheet.key, format, gid), headers=headers)
        return urllib2.urlopen(req)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import getpass
    import csv

    email = "" # (your email here)
    password = getpass.getpass()
    spreadsheet_id = "" # (spreadsheet id here)

    # Create client and spreadsheet objects
    gs = Client(email, password)
    ss = Spreadsheet(spreadsheet_id)

    # Request a file-like object containing the spreadsheet's contents
    csv_file = gs.download(ss)

    # Parse as CSV and print the rows
    for row in csv.reader(csv_file):
        print ", ".join(row)

Solution 2

The https://github.com/burnash/gspread library is a newer, simpler way to interact with Google Spreadsheets, rather than the old answers to this that suggest the gdata library which is not only too low-level, but is also overly-complicated.

You will also need to create and download (in JSON format) a Service Account key: https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials/serviceaccountkey

Here's an example of how to use it:

import csv
import gspread
from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials

scope = ['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds']
credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name('credentials.json', scope)

docid = "0zjVQXjJixf-SdGpLKnJtcmQhNjVUTk1hNTRpc0x5b9c"

client = gspread.authorize(credentials)
spreadsheet = client.open_by_key(docid)
for i, worksheet in enumerate(spreadsheet.worksheets()):
    filename = docid + '-worksheet' + str(i) + '.csv'
    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        writer.writerows(worksheet.get_all_values())

Solution 3

You might try using the AuthSub method described in the Exporting Spreadsheets section of the documentation.

Get a separate login token for the spreadsheets service and substitue that for the export. Adding this to the get_spreadsheet code worked for me:

import gdata.spreadsheet.service

def get_spreadsheet(key, gid=0):
    # ...
    spreadsheets_client = gdata.spreadsheet.service.SpreadsheetsService()
    spreadsheets_client.email = gd_client.email
    spreadsheets_client.password = gd_client.password
    spreadsheets_client.source = "My Fancy Spreadsheet Downloader"
    spreadsheets_client.ProgrammaticLogin()

    # ...
    entry = gd_client.GetDocumentListEntry(uri)
    docs_auth_token = gd_client.GetClientLoginToken()
    gd_client.SetClientLoginToken(spreadsheets_client.GetClientLoginToken())
    gd_client.Export(entry, file_path)
    gd_client.SetClientLoginToken(docs_auth_token) # reset the DocList auth token

Notice I also used Export, as Download seems to give only PDF files.

Solution 4

(Jul 2016) Rephrasing with current terminology: "How do I download a Google Sheet in CSV or XLSX format from Google Drive using Python?". (Google Docs now only refers to the cloud-based word processor/text editor which doesn't provide access to Google Sheets spreadsheets.)

First, all other answers are pretty much outdated or will be, either because they use GData ("Google Data") Protocol, ClientLogin, or AuthSub, all of which have been deprecated. The same is true for all code or libraries that use the Google Sheets API v3 or older.

Modern Google API access occurs using API keys (for accessing public data), OAuth2 client IDs (for accessing data owned by users), or service accounts (for accessing data owned by applications/in the cloud) primarily with the Google Cloud client libraries for GCP APIs and Google APIs Client Libraries for non-GCP APIs. For this task, it would be the latter for Python.

To make it happen your code needs authorized access to the Google Drive API, perhaps to query for specific Sheets to download, and then to perform the actual export(s). Since this is likely a common operation, I wrote a blogpost sharing a code snippet that does this for you. If you wish to pursue this even more, I've got another pair of posts along with a video that outlines how to upload files to and download files from Google Drive.

Note that there is also a newer Google Sheets API v4, but it's primarily for spreadsheet-oriented operations, i.e., inserting data, reading spreadsheet rows, cell formatting, creating charts, adding pivot tables, etc., not file-based request like exporting where the Drive API is the correct one to use.

I wrote a blog post that demos exporting a Google Sheet as CSV from Drive. The core part of the script:

# setup
FILENAME = 'inventory'
SRC_MIMETYPE = 'application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet'
DST_MIMETYPE = 'text/csv'
DRIVE = discovery.build('drive', 'v3', http=creds.authorize(Http()))

# query for file to export
files = DRIVE.files().list(
    q='name="%s" and mimeType="%s"' % (FILENAME, SRC_MIMETYPE), orderBy='modifiedTime desc,name').execute().get('files', [])

# export 1st match (if found)
if files:
    fn = '%s.csv' % os.path.splitext(files[0]['name'].replace(' ', '_'))[0]
    print('Exporting "%s" as "%s"... ' % (files[0]['name'], fn), end='')
    data = DRIVE.files().export(fileId=files[0]['id'], mimeType=DST_MIMETYPE).execute()
    if data:
        with open(fn, 'wb') as f:
            f.write(data)
        print('DONE')

To learn more about using Google Sheets with Python, see my answer for a similar question. You can also download a Sheet in XLSX and other formats supported by Drive.

If you're completely new to Google APIs, then you need to take a further step back and review these videos first:

• How to use Google APIs & create API projects -- the UI has changed but the concepts are still the same
• Walkthrough of authorization boilerplate code (Python) -- you can use any supported language to access Google APIs; if you don't do Python, use it as pseudocode to help get you started
• Listing your files in Google Drive and code deep dive post

If you already have experience with G Suite APIs and want to see more videos on using both APIs:

• Sheets API video library
• Drive API video library

Solution 5

This no longer works as of gdata 2.0.1.4:

gd_client.SetClientLoginToken(spreadsheets_client.GetClientLoginToken())

Instead, you have to do:

gd_client.SetClientLoginToken(gdata.gauth.ClientLoginToken(spreadsheets_client.GetClientLoginToken()))

View more solutions

Comments

[michael]

can you go the other way? log in with the gd_client and then pass the spreadsheet client a token?

[MrColes]

awesome—a nice reusable example!

[Evan Plaice]

This should be the chosen solution. Removing the gdata dependency is a huge plus and you even packaged it in a way that it could be used as both a console app and a library. I added exception handling around the get_auth_token request but only so I could output a meaningful message when an incorrect password is encountered.

[Spacedman]

Is there a reason to loop over the csv_file object? Why not just print csv_file.read() - csv in, csv out!

[Cameron Spickert]

@Spacedman the csv.reader bit is included mainly as an example of how to parse the spreadsheet once it's downloaded.

[aculich]

A better solution is now available since this answer was originally accepted.

[a paid nerd]

Just checked it out. Looks good and I'll mark it as the default. Awesome!

[Ben Sullins]

Just used this also, great stuff! ps - you can change the method to use the doc name instead of the key which is nice.

[d12frosted]

And this just loads all worksheets. Is it possible to load worksheet by gid, not index or name?

[Francis Davey]

The ClientLogin method has been withdrawn now hasn't it? So any solution would have to be OAth2 - is there any way of avoiding that complexity?

[Moses Liao GZ]

I use this method and I have this problem UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128)

[grasshopper]

developers.google.com/identity/protocols/… as Francis said, this doesn't work anymore.

[Robert Bruce]

This example will NO LONGER WORK, as the "ClientLogin" interface has been disabled. developers.google.com/identity/protocols/AuthForInstalledApp‌​s

[Richard de Ree]

The email auth doesn't work anymore. So this solution don't work. You need to have OAuth 2.0 google.com/…

[Richard de Ree]

This solution is outdated and won't work, like allmost all answers here you need to use oauth2.0

[aculich]

thanks @Richard I updated this example to use an oauth2

[Dmitry Dubovitsky]

for Python2 and non English symbol, as @MosesLiaoGZ noted before, you can use stackoverflow.com/a/51003728/1072782

[Manthan_Admane]

How did you get that link with "out:csv" attached to it?

[Manthan_Admane]

Did you add it manually like answered in- stackoverflow.com/questions/24255472/…