[CentOS] excel parser (preferably perl)?

Mon Oct 18 22:54:09 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 10/18/2010 5:31 PM, JohnS wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 17:13 -0500, 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 think you are out of luck on that.  .Net has a whole world of Office
> Goodies what a shame...
> Extract the CSV Data then do a insert into MySQL.  Is that how you do it
> now?

Yes, someone emails an xls or xlsx, I do a 'save as' csv, but it's not a 
straight insert after that.  I read it into perl and do some checking 
and conversions, depending on the data involved, then an insert or 
update.  I expected the db to be the authoritative copy but I keep 
getting batches of wholesale modifications to merge in so I'd like to 
automate it a little more completely.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com