Les Mikesell wrote, On 10/18/2010 06:13 PM:
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.
Would it cause more headaches than it would solve, for you to hook the excel folks directly to the mysql db and have their changes take place immediately? Assuming a LAN environment here instead of 'the only connection is email'. Could you do the sanity checking you currently do by using some db functions?
"MySQL Forums :: Microsoft Access :: Connecting MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access to MySQL using ODBC" http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?65,148441,148441
* OK, I often come at problems from a different direction. *