I am working on a data analysis project in Python. I have an .xls file that I need to read and get certain information from each line. I am using xlrd.

When I open the file in notepad, the first ten lines are comments about what the file contains, and then I get to the actual data. How do I skip all the lines beginning with "#"?

Also, once I get to the rows, I want to iterate through each row and separate the elements in each column of each row and add it to a dictionary for each column. How would I separate data in each row based on the column ? 

As of now, here is my code:

```
    peaksheets = peakfile.sheet_by_name("Sheet1")
    num_rows = peaksheets.nrows -1
    curr_row = -1
    while curr_row < num_rows:
            curr_row +=1
            row = str(peaksheet.row(curr_row))
            words = row.strip().split('\t')
            c = words[0]
            s = int(words[1])

```

I am also getting the following error when I run my code:

```
xlrd.biffh.XLRDError: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found '# This f'

```

Which is why I want to skip the lines starting with the "#" symbol.