[ANN] xls-0.1.0 Parse MS Excel spreadsheets

I have uploaded the xls package [1] on Hackage [2]. It works pretty well for the basic use case of parsing all sheets in a single stream of rows composed of cells. The cell values are presented as plain strings i.e. no data type based interpretation. Such stuff can be added if required, it is supported by the underlying C library (libxls). One thing that I would like to have added to the API is a way to list all sheets and select sheets to parse in a workbook. It should be pretty easy to do if anyone wants to do it. 1. https://github.com/harendra-kumar/xls 2. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xls -harendra

On Mon, 17 Oct 2016, Harendra Kumar wrote:
I have uploaded the xls package [1] on Hackage [2]. It works pretty well for the basic use case of parsing all sheets in a single stream of rows composed of cells. The cell values are presented as plain strings i.e. no data type based interpretation. Such stuff can be added if required, it is supported by the underlying C library (libxls). One thing that I would like to have added to the API is a way to list all sheets and select sheets to parse in a workbook. It should be pretty easy to do if anyone wants to do it. 1. https://github.com/harendra-kumar/xls 2. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xls
Btw. I recently found out that a pretty nice and simple format for interchange between Haskell, Excel and LibreOffice is the Excel 2003 XML format. It supports Unicode, hyperlinks, merged cells, font styles, formulas, reliable number formats (no hassle with decimal point vs. decimal comma) - neither CSV nor HTML supports all of these features.

On 17 October 2016 at 15:02, Henning Thielemann < lemming@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
Btw. I recently found out that a pretty nice and simple format for interchange between Haskell, Excel and LibreOffice is the Excel 2003 XML format. It supports Unicode, hyperlinks, merged cells, font styles, formulas, reliable number formats (no hassle with decimal point vs. decimal comma) - neither CSV nor HTML supports all of these features.
Do you directly interpret the XML or there is a higher level package to do so? Why not use Office Open XML, the 2007 format? One way to interpret the older formats like BIFF/Excel-97 could be to convert them to the newer ones and then parse it as the newer format. That way we will have to deal with only one format. Are there any such lightweight, command line based converters available? -harendra

On Mon, 17 Oct 2016, Harendra Kumar wrote:
On 17 October 2016 at 15:02, Henning Thielemann
wrote: Btw. I recently found out that a pretty nice and simple format for interchange between Haskell, Excel and LibreOffice is the Excel 2003 XML format. It supports Unicode, hyperlinks, merged cells, font styles, formulas, reliable number formats (no hassle with decimal point vs. decimal comma) - neither CSV nor HTML supports all of these features.
Do you directly interpret the XML or there is a higher level package to do so?
So far I have only used it with custom code in a project and have only written it, not parsed.
participants (2)
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Harendra Kumar
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Henning Thielemann