kieranbarnes do you know where your towel is?

Converting XLS to CSV. Simple, eh? Well, sorta.

I hate problems that can be solved really easily. (With a totally different set of tools). I needed to open Excel (XLS) files in PHP. Simple enough you think, IF you are using Windows.

IF I was using Windows, I would have a bunch of options open to me, I could use PHP's COM & .NET functions. Or PHP's ODBC functions. Or a selection of classess from PHP Classes.

BUT I am using Linux. Just to be awkward. So I don't have any of those options.

AND to really confuse things, there are two packages called xls2csv.

• Ken Prows provides a Perl tool. View site.
• Vitus Wagner provides C tool part of the catdoc package. View site. (Currently down).

The best alternative to COM & ODBC I can find is Ken Prows' xls2csv package. I'd have to call this Perl utility via system() or similar from PHP. Already it sounds ugly.

Sometimes making a valid business decision being lazy pays off. I use Ubuntu. I can use apt to install catdoc

apt-get install catdoc

Job done. Usage is fairly straight forward. There is a man page here.

I slightly prefer Ken's version of this tool for a few reasons;

• His site works. Well, not his, CPAN's.
• It has a -q for quiet mode.

Here's how I installed it,

First off, You need a whole bunch of modules you've never heard of before.
It's probably worth throwing that lot into an interactive CPAN shell and letting it do the hard work.perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'

• Locale::Recode
• Unicode::Map
• Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
• Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtUnicode (Should come with the above).
• Text::CSV_XS

Now, download the source from Ken Prows' site.

CPAN wouldn't build xls2csv from the shell, but when I ran it manually, it seemed fine.

tar zxpfv xls2csv-1.06.tar.gz
cd xls2csv-1.06
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Related posts:

1. Why does perl consume my entire CPU?
   I use a perl script to convert an Excel file to CSV on an Ubuntu...
2. FuzzyOCR for SpamAssassin on Ubuntu
   FuzzyOCR is a plugin for SpamAssassin that analyzes the content and properties of images to...
3. Ridiculously simple NTLM Authentication for Apache (Ubuntu)
   We all know Ubuntu makes things amazingly simple. This is the best I've found so...
4. Installing mytop on cpanel
   MyTop is one of the best MySQL monitoring tools available, written by a MySQL...
5. Really freakin’ simple mysql virtual hosting pure-ftpd
   This article will guide you through installing pure-ftpd configured for virtual hosts using mysql as...

What this article useful to you?

Let me know, buy me a beer!
Alternatively, if you're feeling impecunious, you may like to subscribe to my RSS feed, or see other articles in the Linux, PHP category.