BUG: Reading a Boolean column with "blanks" from an Excel file raises an absurd error

[mhabets]

Pandas version checks

• I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.

Reproducible Example

# var1 column in the Excel file contains TRUE, FALSE, and "blank" cells
df = pd.read_excel('issue_sample.xlsx', dtype={'var1': 'boolean'})

Issue Description

When reading a Boolean column with "blanks" from an Excel file, I am getting the following absurd error message:
ValueError: True cannot be cast to bool

Expected Behavior

True should be cast to boolean without any issue...

Installed Versions

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : bb1f651
python : 3.8.12.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Windows
OS-release : 10
Version : 10.0.22000
machine : AMD64
processor : AMD64 Family 23 Model 96 Stepping 1, AuthenticAMD
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : en
LOCALE : English_United Kingdom.1252

pandas : 1.4.0
numpy : 1.22.2
pytz : 2021.3
dateutil : 2.8.2
pip : 22.0.3
setuptools : 60.7.1
Cython : None
pytest : 6.2.2
hypothesis : None
sphinx : 4.4.0
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : 3.0.2
lxml.etree : 4.6.2
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : 2.8.6
jinja2 : 3.0.3
IPython : 7.31.1
pandas_datareader: None
bs4 : None
bottleneck : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : None
gcsfs : None
matplotlib : 3.5.1
numba : None
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.0.5
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : None
pyreadstat : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.6.3
sqlalchemy : 1.4.31
tables : None
tabulate : None
xarray : None
xlrd : 2.0.1
xlwt : None
zstandard : None

[mroeschke]

Could you provide a minimal, reproducible example? https://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2018/02/28/minimal-bug-reports

[mhabets]

Please find below an example of file which is raising the mentioned error with the line of code provided above.
issue_sample.xlsx

[mhabets]

Issue related to the fact that BooleanArray._from_sequence_of_strings() is getting a bool where it is expecting a str

[dimitra-karadima]

Hello! I am interested in working on this issue. If you have any suggestions please let me know!

[dimitra-karadima]

take

[barnabywalters]

Was any progress ever made on this? I just ran into the same issue in pandas 2.1.4

[yuanx749]

Come across this. Using df = pd.read_excel('issue_sample.xlsx', dtype_backend='numpy_nullable') works.

[asishm]

@rmhowe425 I think #58994 closes this one as well right?

[rmhowe425]

@asishm Yes!

[rmhowe425]

@rhshadrach Are we okay with closing this issue?

[rhshadrach]

Yep - thanks!