On Mon, Oct 18, 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:
I'm getting tired of converting spreadsheets that someone else updates to csv so my perl scripts can push the data into a mysql database. Is there a better way? I haven't had much luck with perl-Spreadsheet-ParseExcel (and find it odd that yum prefers the .32 version from epel over .57 from rpmforge anyway). Is the current CPAN version better? Or the equivalent java tools? Or maybe a scripted OpenOffice conversion would be possible.
Needs to deal with both xls and xlsx formats, the odd characters that are confused with quotes even after csv conversion, numbers with $'s and commas embedded, excel's date formatting nonsense, etc.
I don't do much perl these days, having switched to python for most of my stuff.
There is at least one python package for this:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd
A google search on ``python excel reader'' came up with quite a few hits.
Of course there are easy python dbi interfaces to mysql, postgresql, and other SQL databases as well.
Bill