[Dis] claimer：我是 xlrd 的作者/维护者。

公式文本的文档引用关于名称公式;阅读文档开头附近的命名引用，常量，公式和宏一节。这些公式与全部或全部相关联的名称相关联;它们与单个细胞无关。例如： PI 映射到 = 22/7 ， SALES 映射到 = Mktng！$ A $ 2：$ Z $ 99 。名称公式反编译器是为了支持检查定义名称的更简单和/或常用的用法而编写的。

通常，公式有几种：单元格，共享式，和数组（全部与单元格相关联，直接或间接），名称，数据验证和条件格式。

将字节码中的通用公式解码为文本是一种在进行中，缓慢。请注意，假设它可用，那么您需要解析文本公式来提取单元格引用。正确分析Excel公式不是一件容易的事情;与HTML一样，使用正则表达式看起来很容易，但不起作用。***从公式字节码直接提取引用。

另请注意，基于单元格的公式可以引用名称，名称公式可以同时指向单元格和其他名称。因此，有必要从基于单元格和名称公式中提取单元格和名称引用。您可以使用有关共享公式的信息;否则解析了以下内容：

  B2 = A2 
 B3 = A3 + B2 
 B4 = A4 + B3 
 B5 = A5 + B4 
 ... 
 B60 = A60 + B59 
 

您需要自己推断 B3：B60 公式之间的相似性。

在任何情况下，上述任何一种都不会很快在任何时候 - xlrd 优先级在别的地方。

I have to port an algorithm from an Excel sheet to python code but I have to reverse engineer the algorithm from the Excel file.

The Excel sheet is quite complicated, it contains many cells in which there are formulas that refer to other cells (that can also contains a formula or a constant).

My idea is to analyze with a python script the sheet building a sort of table of dependencies between cells, that is:

A1 depends on B4,C5,E7 formula: "=sqrt(B4)+C5*E7"
A2 depends on B5,C6 formula: "=sin(B5)*C6"
...

The xlrd python module allows to read an XLS workbook but at the moment I can access to the value of a cell, not the formula.

For example, with the following code I can get simply the value of a cell:

import xlrd

#open the .xls file
xlsname="test.xls"
book = xlrd.open_workbook(xlsname)

#build a dictionary of the names->sheets of the book
sd={}
for s in book.sheets():
    sd[s.name]=s

#obtain Sheet "Foglio 1" from sheet names dictionary
sheet=sd["Foglio 1"]

#print value of the cell J141
print sheet.cell(142,9)

Anyway, It seems to have no way to get the formul from the Cell object returned by the .cell(...) method. In documentation they say that it is possible to get a string version of the formula (in english because there is no information about function name translation stored in the Excel file). They speak about formulas (expressions) in the Name and Operand classes, anyway I cannot understand how to get the instances of these classes by the Cell class instance that must contains them.

Could you suggest a code snippet that gets the formula text from a cell?

[Dis]claimer: I'm the author/maintainer of xlrd.

The documentation references to formula text are about "name" formulas; read the section "Named references, constants, formulas, and macros" near the start of the docs. These formulas are associated sheet-wide or book-wide to a name; they are not associated with individual cells. Examples: PI maps to =22/7, SALES maps to =Mktng!$A$2:$Z$99. The name-formula decompiler was written to support inspection of the simpler and/or commonly found usages of defined names.

Formulas in general are of several kinds: cell, shared, and array (all associated with a cell, directly or indirectly), name, data validation, and conditional formatting.

Decompiling general formulas from bytecode to text is a "work-in-progress", slowly. Note that supposing it were available, you would then need to parse the text formula to extract the cell references. Parsing Excel formulas correctly is not an easy job; as with HTML, using regexes looks easy but doesn't work. It would be better to extract the references directly from the formula bytecode.

Also note that cell-based formulas can refer to names, and name formulas can refer both to cells and to other names. So it would be necessary to extract both cell and name references from both cell-based and name formulas. It may be useful to you to have info on shared formulas available; otherwise having parsed the following:

B2 =A2
B3 =A3+B2
B4 =A4+B3
B5 =A5+B4
...
B60 =A60+B59

you would need to deduce the similarity between the B3:B60 formulas yourself.

In any case, none of the above is likely to be available any time soon -- xlrd priorities lie elsewhere.