I see two answers with good qualities, each with a small flaw, so I will give my take on it: Try os.path.exists, and consider os.makedirs...
The line of code that throws Could not run curl-config: [Errno 2] No such file or directory” when installing pycurl on Linux, should inform the user as to remedy - a pre-requisite, rather than leaving them to test their google skills.
Try the xlrd library. From what I can see from your comment, something like the snippet below might do the trick. I'm assuming here that...
nltk tweettokenizer, Natural Language Toolkit
Installation of pysftp in debian 9 and Ubuntu