converting an Excel (xls) file to a comma separated (csv) file without the GUI

Question

Is there a simple way to translate an XLS to a CSV formatted file without starting the Excel windowed application?

I need to process some Excel XLS workbooks with sc

Answer 1

my solution:

use Spreadsheet::BasicRead;

my $xls = 'file.xls';   
my $csv = 'file.csv';

   my $ss = new Spreadsheet::BasicRead($xls) or die "Could not open '$xls': $!";
   my $name = '';
   my $row = 0;

   open(FILE, ">$csv") or die "Could not open : $!\n";
      flock(FILE, 2) or die "Could not lock file\n"; 

        while (my $data = $ss->getNextRow()){
            $row++;
            $name = join(';',@$data);         
            print FILE $name."\n" if ($name ne "");
        }

      flock(FILE, 8); 
   close FILE; 

Answer 2

You can do it with Alacon - command-line utility for Alasql database.

It works with Node.js, so you need to install Node.js and then Alasql package:

> npm install alasql

To convert Excel file to CVS (ot TSV) you can enter:

> node alacon "SELECT * INTO CSV('mydata.csv', {headers:true}) FROM XLS('mydata.xls', {headers:true})"

Alacon supports other type of conversions (CSV, TSV, TXT, XLSX, XLS) and SQL language constructions (see User Manual for examples).

Answer 3

You can use xls2csv from the catdoc package if you're on Debian/Ubuntu

Answer 4

In Java world you can use apache poi. You could start from the following Groovy snippet.

FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(filename);
Workbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook(fis); 
Sheet sheet = wb.getSheetAt(0);
for (Row row : sheet) {
  for (Cell cell : row) {
    doSomething(cell.toString())
  }

}

Answer 5

Excel can be used as datasource and there are drivers available to access EXCEL as database.

1.) Create and Open a connection to EXCEL file, which you want to convert into CSV.

2.) Fire a query like "SELECT * From Sheet1", which will load all the data of Sheet1 into recordset or datatable.

3.) Since I'm using .net, I can hold those records on datatable and convert into CSV using following extension method.

        public static string ToCSV(this DataTable _dataTable)
        {
            StringBuilder csv = new StringBuilder();
            StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(csv);
            int icolcount = _dataTable.Columns.Count;
            for (int i = 0; i < icolcount; i++)
            {
                sw.Write(_dataTable.Columns[i]);
                if (i < icolcount - 1)
                {
                    sw.Write(",");
                }
            }
            sw.Write(sw.NewLine);
            foreach (DataRow drow in _dataTable.Rows)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < icolcount; i++)
                {
                    if (!Convert.IsDBNull(drow[i]))
                    {
                        sw.Write(drow[i].ToString());
                    }
                    if (i < icolcount - 1)
                    {
                        sw.Write(",");
                    }
                }
                sw.Write(sw.NewLine);
            }
            sw.Close();
            return csv.ToString();
        }

You can apply this approach on the platform you're working on.

Thanks.

Answer 6

If You have Cygwin, most probablly You will have Python. If not - install python and use this script. It is much more than You need, but will convert easilly and fast.