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 -- INTERNET: bill at celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way Voice: (206) 236-1676 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820 Fax: (206) 232-9186 Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792 It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Dijkstra