Gdown not working for Google Spreadsheet

[JohannZhu]

So when I try to download a Google Spreadsheet (the xlsx liked file) to Google Colab with Gdown it fails and complains permission denied.

My Setup:

• File is a Google Spreadsheet.
• File size is small.
• File ID is from a public (anyone can access) viewer only link.
• File is hosted in my own Google Drive and the link is not given to anyone (so I suppose the "too many access" issue does not apply here).

Error Message:
Access denied with the following error:
Cannot retrieve the public link of the file. You may need to change
the permission to 'Anyone with the link', or have had many accesses.
You may still be able to access the file from the browser:
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=pbef&id=\<FileID>

Solutions I tried but does not work:

• Upgrade Gdown: !pip install -U --no-cache-dir gdown --pre
• Do not use cli: gdown.download(f"https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=pbef&id={gdid_dataset}", output_path)
• Change permission from public viewer to public editor
• Add "&confirm=t"

Additional:

• As you can see there is an URL in the error message. I tried it in my private window (Firefox) and it gives "internal server error". (So I suspect it might be an issue with how Gdown interpret Spreadsheet URL. I mean it might be different from general file's share links.)
• I tried to create a dummy spreadsheet in my own Google Drive and successfully reproduced the issue.
• I tried to download my other data sets (none spreadsheet) with Gdown and they work fine, including csv files.

[wkentaro]

Hey, maybe you can try this:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28494469/4158863

I haven't decided how we support spreadsheet in Gdown, so keep me posted for your use case.
Basically, Google Drive offers several formats: csv, xslx, tsv, etc for Spreadsheet, and Gdown probably should these instead of just URL.

[wkentaro]

Closed via #255