Python 3 copy data as is with xlrd and xlwt - xlrd

Question

I'm new to programming, teaching myself Python3. Wife asked me to make her a script that will read data from excel, from one column, and copy every other row into another column.
She has an excel of 12k rows and it's in form of: row1=string, row2=(int/float/date/time), row3=string, row4=(int/float/date/time)...
what i did is this:
import xlrd
import xlwt
workbook = xlrd.open_workbook("MyExcel.xls")
sheet = workbook.sheet_by_index(0)
wb = xlwt.Workbook()
ws = wb.add_sheet("Sheet1")
i = 0
data = []
for i in range(sheet.nrows):
if i % 2 == 0:
value = sheet.cell(i, 0).value
data.append(value)
j = 0
for j in range(len(data)):
ws.write(j, 0, data[j])
j += 1
wb.save("MyOutput.xls")
It works fine, but the issue is that it works fine with strings and integers, not with dates or time, it converts those into floats.
I just need it to copy the value of each cell "as is" no formatting or anything, just copy paste. If a cell has a value of: "monkey/73.0:blah" i just want it to copy it as "monkey/73.0:blah" into the new excel.
Any idea how to achieve this?
ps: I know it can be achieved within excel itself, without using python(with INDEX and ROWS), but i'm curious as to how to transfer data in this way as normal copy paste, without it for example dividing my dates into a float if its 1/1/2016.
Thx

Answer 1

You can't do exactly what you want to, because you don't understand what Excel stores in the file.
Dates and times are stored as floating-point values. Time values are between 0 and 1.0, and date/time values are stored as larger numbers (negative dates are not handled correctly by many versions of Excel). You can't just copy the cell values "as-is" (i.e., without formatting) because formatting is the only way a cell is known to be a date or time!
To read the dates & times, you could replace your block of code that builds the data list with this:
cv = lambda v, t: (v if t != 3
else datetime(*(xlrd.xldate_as_tuple(v, workbook.datemode))))
data = [ cv(sheet.cell(i, 0).value, sheet.cell_type(i, 0))
for i in range(1, sheet.nrows, 2) ]
This will give you a list of string, float, and datetime objects you can write to your output file (writing dates using xlrw is left as an exercise for the reader because I haven't done it, and it's late here & now).