Yes. I just figured it out. I was reading the data using $cell->{Val} which apparently contains the unformatted cell value. I changed to using $cell->value() and that worked (almost..).
I still cannot read Chinese characters from an Excel file. I am guessing the encoding I pass to the decode() function in TextFmt() is wrong, but I do not know how to find the encoding of Excel cells. I tried 'UTF16-LE', 'UTF16-BE', and 'UTF-8' but none worked. Leaving the TextFmt function as it is posted here does not work. Anyone have an idea as to what I might be doing wrong? | [reply] |
Yes. I figured out part of the problem. Apparently $cell->{Val} contains the unformatted value of a cell, whereas $cell->value() has the formatted value.
But I am still having trouble extracting the right data. My output looks garbled. I tried converting from UTF16-LE, UTF16-BE, UTF-8, and nothing seems to work. I even tried downloading several utilities from the web with no luck converting Unicode data. The only thing that does work is if I save the file as a different format from within Excel itself, but I am looking for a batch way to do this.
Does anyone know of a command line utility that will convert .xls files containing Unicode data into XML? Or a library that works? Thanks in advance! | [reply] |
Nevermind. I determined that I should be using visual basic + the Microsoft Office Excel reference library to convert the files and then read them with Perl. Following suggestions from:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/174446/how-to-automate-converting-excel-xls-files-to-excel-xml-fromat | [reply] |