title: How can i extract data from an excel sheet embedded in html using python and beautifulsoup?
body: <p>So i got the idea of extracting data from a table on a webpage, so that i can average it, visually represent it, and work with it. I've tried using python with beautifulsoup to get the data, but I still end up with the weird excel formatting code in the beggining that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!--table
      {mso-displayed-decimal-separator:"\.";
      mso-displayed-thousand-separator:"\,";}
  @page
      {margin:1.0in .75in 1.0in .75in;
      mso-header-margin:.51in;
      mso-footer-margin:.51in;}
  .style0
      {mso-number-format:General;
      text-align:general;
      vertical-align:bottom;
      white-space:nowrap;
      mso-rotate:0;
      mso-background-source:auto;
  ...(more of the same)
  ...
  
  --&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've looked at the source code of the page and it includes:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta name=ProgId content=Excel.Sheet&gt;
  &lt;meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Excel 14"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can i extract the data in a meaningful way, that preserves it and allows it to be manipulated? thank you for your time.</p>
  
  <p>My current script just uses curl to get the html file, then opens the html file and uses beautifulsoup get_text on it, and saves this to a text file.</p>