IllegalCharacterError raised when exporting xlsx

[MohiniLimbodia]

Using tablib version 0.13.0
The issue is with Control Characters and Surrogates

Steps to reproduce:

from tablib import Dataset
data=Dataset((u'\x1f',),)
data.export('xlsx')

Stack Trace

IllegalCharacterErrorTraceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-1-9b9694f739ff> in <module>()
      1 from tablib import Dataset
      2 data=Dataset((u'\x1f',),)
----> 3 data.export('xlsx')

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tablib/core.pyc in export(self, format, **kwargs)
    466             raise UnsupportedFormat('Format {0} cannot be exported.'.format(format))
    467 
--> 468         return export_set(self, **kwargs)
    469 
    470     # -------

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tablib/formats/_xlsx.pyc in export_set(dataset, freeze_panes)
     41     ws.title = dataset.title if dataset.title else 'Tablib Dataset'
     42 
---> 43     dset_sheet(dataset, ws, freeze_panes=freeze_panes)
     44 
     45     stream = BytesIO()

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tablib/formats/_xlsx.pyc in dset_sheet(dataset, ws, freeze_panes)
    145                         cell.value = unicode('%s' % col, errors='ignore')
    146                 except TypeError:
--> 147                     cell.value = unicode(col)

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/openpyxl/cell/cell.pyc in value(self, value)
    292     def value(self, value):
    293         """Set the value and infer type and display options."""
--> 294         self._bind_value(value)
    295 
    296     @property

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/openpyxl/cell/cell.pyc in _bind_value(self, value)
    195 
    196         elif isinstance(value, STRING_TYPES):
--> 197             value = self.check_string(value)
    198             self.data_type = self.TYPE_STRING
    199             if len(value) > 1 and value.startswith("="):

/srv/jupyter/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/openpyxl/cell/cell.pyc in check_string(self, value)
    158         value = value[:32767]
    159         if next(ILLEGAL_CHARACTERS_RE.finditer(value), None):
--> 160             raise IllegalCharacterError
    161         return value
    162 

IllegalCharacterError:

[leonardoarroyo]

Also getting this. Openpyxl detects illegal characters with the following regex:

ILLEGAL_CHARACTERS_RE = re.compile(r'[\000-\010]|[\013-\014]|[\016-\037]')

I'm using django-import-export, which in turn uses tablib, which uses openpyxl. Still trying to figure out who should handle the data cleaning.

[leonardoarroyo]

I fixed the issue by cleaning the data before it gets sent to tablib.

If anyone else is having this issue with django-import-export, you can clean your fields by overriding export_field on your resource.

from import_export import resources
from openpyxl.cell.cell import ILLEGAL_CHARACTERS_RE

class CleanModelResource(resources.ModelResource):
  def export_field(self, field, obj):
    v = super(CleanModelResource, self).export_field(field, obj)
    if type(v) == str:
      v = ILLEGAL_CHARACTERS_RE.sub('', v)
    return v