[CentOS] excel parser (preferably perl)?

[Aleksey Tsalolikhin]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> 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.

Hi, Les.

xlhtml has a switch, -csv, to output in Comma Separated Values

http://chicago.sourceforge.net/xlhtml/

I am not sure if it'll do everything you want, it's a few years old, but may
be worth a look.

Best,
-at