fast-ods

A fast, streaming parser for OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) files.

Designed for efficiency, performance and low memory usage, making it an ideal choice for large files and ETL workflows.

Requires Python version 3.10 and above.

This project is still in alpha (pre-1.0). API and behavior might change drastically until the full release.

Features

• ⚡ Streaming parsing (suitable for handling large files with constant memory usage)
• 📈 Supports repeated rows and columns (.ods specific)
• 🧩 Simple, minimal API
• 🌐 Zero external dependencies
• 🔧 Flexible configuration settings

Changelog

v0.3.0 release:

• New parsing algorithm, with an approximate 3x increase in performance on tests*
• Fixed the skip/take N rows logic, aligning it to user expectations and to better reflect how rows are displayed in spreadsheet software

*Tested with an .ods file with 170k lines, the time to parse and write to a .csv file improved from 3 minutes to 47 seconds

Scope

This library focuses on fast data extraction, not full ODS spec compliance. It itentionally does not handle features such as:

• Styling
• Formulas
• Metadata

Installation

Install with the Python default package manager:

pip install fast-ods

Usage

from fast_ods import ODSParser

parser = ODSParser()

for row in parser.parse("file.ods"):
    print(row)

Options

from fast_ods import ODSParser, ODSParserOptions

options = ODSParserOptions(
    table=0,                # Choose a table by index or name
    convert_values=False,   # Convert the cell values (float, date, etc.)
    skip_n_rows=None,       # Skip first N rows
    take_n_rows=None,       # Limit number of rows
    verify_zip=True         # Emits a warning if the .zip archive is corrupted 
)

parser = ODSParser(options)