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pd.read_excel not able to read a xlsx file

I am trying to read an xlsx file using pd.read_excel but getting an error like this:
Error
My code snippet looks like this:
Notebook code
When i tried to open the xlsx file directly from notebook i got this error:
opening xlsx file
PLease help me solve this issue.

Your title says pd.read_excel, but your code says pd.read_csv. CSV files are plain text files, readable with Notepad. XLSX files are binary, and are not human-readable. If you have an XLSX file, then use pd.read_excel, like your title says.

Python: Unsupported format, or corrupt file

I am trying to make a python program that downloads and XLS file from a website, in this case website is: https://www.blackrock.com/uk/individual/products/291392/, and loads it as a dataframe in pandas, with the correct data structure.
The issue is that when I try to load it via pandas, it gives me an error: XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found b'\xef\xbb\xbf\xef\xbb\xbf<?'
I am not quite sure what is causing this error, but presumable something with the file. I can open the file in Excel, even though I get a warning that the file and the file extension do not match, and that the file might be dangerous etc. If I click yes to opening it anyway, it opens up with data displayed correctly. If I use Excel to save the file as .xlsx i can open it in pandas, but I would rather a solution that didn't require manually opening Excel and saving the file.
I have tried renaming the file extension to xlsx, but this does not work, as it won't allow me to open the file with that extension.
I have tried many different extension, but non of them bite - unfortunately.
I am at a loss.
I hope, you can help.
EDIT: The code I use is:
download_path = 'https://www.blackrock.com/uk/individual/products/291392/fund/1527484370694.ajax?fileType=xls&fileName=iShares-MSCI-World-SRI-UCITS-ETF-USD-Dist_fund&dataType=fund'
testing = pd.read_excel(download_path, engine='xlrd', sheet_name = 'Holdings', skiprows = 3)

The actual problem is that the file format is SpreadSheetML which has only been used briefly between 2003 and 2006. It has been overtaken by the XLSX format. Since, it has been around for a short time and while ago, most packages do not support for load/save operations. More about the format can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/office-xp/aa140066(v=office.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN
For this reason, the Pandas or any other XML parser (e.g Etree) will not be able to load properly. The regular MS Office software would still load it correctly. As far as I know, you can deal with SpreadSheetML files using aspose-cells package: https://products.aspose.com/cells/python-java/
For your case:
# Import packages
import jpype
import asposecells
jpype.startJVM()
from asposecells.api import Workbook, FileFormatType
from asposecells.api import HtmlSaveOptions
# Read Workbook
workbook = Workbook('iShares-MSCI-World-SRI-UCITS-ETF-USD-Dist_fund.xls')
worksheet = workbook.getWorksheets().get(0)
# Accessing a cell using its name
cells = worksheet.getCells()
cell = cells.get("A1")
# Print Message
print("Cell Value: " + str(cell.getValue())) # Prints Cell Value: 17-Nov-2021
# To save SpreadSheetML in different format (HTML)
saveOptions = HtmlSaveOptions()
saveOptions.setDisableDownlevelRevealedComments(True)
workbook.save("iShares-MSCI-World-SRI-UCITS-ETF-USD-Dist_fund.html", saveOptions)

As mentioned by Slybot, this is not a real xls file.
If you inspect the contents in a plain text editor, or a hex editor, the header starts:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ss:Workbook xmlns:ss="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet">
which confirms this is an xml document, and not an Office 2007 zipped xlsx office document.
Your next steps depend on whether you have Excel installed on the machine that will be running this code or not, and if not, what other libraries you have access to and are willing to pay for - Slybot has mentioned aspose for example.
The easiest solution - Excel
If you are running this on a Windows machine with Excel installed, you have the free and capable option of automating the operation of opening Excel and saving as xlsx. This is by using Win32com module, described in this answer:
Attempting to Parse an XLS (XML) File Using Python
Alternatively, save your Excel styled XML as xlsx with Workbook.SaveAs method using win32com (only for Windows users) and read in with pandas.read_excel skipping appropriate rows.
The XML solution
You could read in the raw XML and digest it. The relevant nodes are:
<ss:Workbook>
<ss:Worksheet ss:Name="Holdings">
<ss:Table>
<ss:Row>
<ss:Cell ss:StyleID="Left">
<ss:Data ss:Type="String">iShares MSCI World SRI UCITS ETF</ss:Data>
The Third-party library solution
I am not familiar with any libraries which provide this functionality, and can't advise on this option.

Pandas.read_excel: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record

I'm trying to use pandas.read_excel to read in .xls files. It succeeds on most of my .xls files, but then for some it errors out with the following error message:
Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found '\x00\x05\x16\x07\x00\x02\x00\x00'
I've been trying to research why this is happening to some, but not all files. The xlrd version is 1.0.0. I tried to manually read in with xlrd.open_workbook and I get the same result.
Does anyone know what file type, this BOF record is referring to?

There are various reasons to why that error message appeared. However, the main reason could be due to the Excel file itself. Sometimes, especially if you're pulling an Excel file from some Reporting Portal, the Excel file could be corrupt so the best thing would be to open the Excel file and save it as a new .xls file then retry running pandas.read_excel.
Lemme know if it works.

I solved this problem loading it with pd.read_table (it loads everything into one column)
df = pd.read_table('path/to/xls_file/' + 'my_file.xls')
then I split this column with
df = df['column_name'].str.split("your_separator", expand=True)

Please check if you have given the right extension of the file either xlsx or csv. a wrong extension specified of the file may cause this issue.

How to import an old Excel file with extension.xls?

I have a file from SAS that is exported as an older Excel .xls file. I would like to import this file into python 3.5.
when I do:
import pandas as pd
Filewant = pd.read_excel("Filepath\\\Filename.xls")
I get a bunch of error messages culminating in
XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found b'<html xm'
if I open up the file and manually save it in a current .xlsx file and us the same command line using:
Filewant =pd.read_excel("Filepath\\Filename\.xlsx")
then the file is imported into Python properly. However, I want the process to be more automated so I don't to have to manually save the file to .xlsx format to make it work.

SAS tech support told me that this won't work and that I'll need to convert the .xls SAS output into a .xlsx file:
Unfortunately, the MSOffice2K destination creates an HTML file even though it uses the .XLS extension here which allows the file to be opened with excel.
You can use VBScript to convert the file to .XLSX, however, there is no way to do this using the MSoffice2K destination.

The error message tells you the problem. found b'<html xm' Your file is an HTML file and not an XLS file. This was commonly done with "old" SAS since it did not support writing XLS files, but Excel did support reading HTML files.

python xlrd errors related to file extension changes

I am trying to organize a very large number of .DTA files using the xlrd library.
The first thing I found out was that .DTA files could be exported to excel files just by changing the extension .xls and opening them in excel. It gives a warning when you open it gives an error about a possibly corrupted file, but opens normally otherwise.
the file you are trying to open is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you want to open the file now?
When in python however, when I try to open the file all I get is an error with no helpful information, which I'm pretty sure is caused by the file extension issue.
File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 1323, in getbof
raise XLRDError('Expected BOF record; found 0x%04x' % opcode)
XLRDError: Expected BOF record; found 0x5845
I tried my code by cutting and pasting the data into a new excel file and naming it the same thing and it worked, so I'm pretty sure this is the issue, but I have too many files to be able to do this for each one individually.
Is there a better way to solve this? Supressing the error or actually changing the file type and not just its extension somehow?

I think there is a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of the file that is not observable but exists. This answer describes how to remove it < converting utf-16 -> utf-8 AND remove BOM>.