And if I'd looked just a wee bit further than the pod, I'd have found ~/Spreadsheet/WriteExcel/examples/csv2xls.pl which does this exact same thing.

Yes, but yours is nicer. ;-) In fact if you don't mind I'll include it in the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel distro. Since your version deals with generic separators you could re-target it and call it text2xls.

Just a few notes:

Parsing CSV is never as easy as it seems, therefore, for more general applications it is worth considering Text::CSV_XS or Text::CSV. If the stated purpose is to split on a single character then your method is fine.

# Prettify row as header.

Prettifying the first row is a good idea. Unfortunately, it won't work like this because set_row() defines the default format for cells written by Excel and not for cells written by WriteExcel. This is easy to fix.

# Unfortunately no support for "freeze pane"

Freeze panes will be in the next version. It is a feature that a *lot* of people have requested.

USAGE:

For anything more than a single line of usage the POD::Usage module is worth considering. This keeps your POD and your usage synchronised. It is also one of the core modules. I tend to use it in any program where I use Getopt::Long. It is a useful module and a clever idea.

Todo: binmode(FH) on xls outfile for cross-platform support.

This isn't required. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel will take care of binmode() for you. It only applies if you are creating a new file based on a filehandle as opposed to a filename.

A useful feature would be an option to split the input file into pages based on ^L, or some other delimiter, and put each page on a new worksheet. This is something that I wanted to add it to the csv2xls.pl example but I didn't have time.

John.
--

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.