Hi I wanna convert excel files to .csv files using only UNIX shell scripts. every one suggested by Perl ,python language, But i need this solution only via UNIX shell scripts.Let me know have any idea about this…
Hi,
You will have your work cut out for you, if you want to convert xls to csv without using a language such as perl. Binary files are hard work in shell.
Funny thing is that the new xlsx format is actually easier to convert than the old xls format; Microsoft must have made a mistake here. With xlsx files you simply unzip the file and extract the data from the XML files. The only difficulty being that text and numerics are not stored in the same file, but it can be done (relatively easily in awk or perl).
Hi,
Excel files have a lot of binary characters (excel file is not an ascii
text file)
and manipulation of binary file is very difficult(but possible with some
external commands)
find convertor from google and many convertors are written with “C”
language…
Microsoft formats are (deliberately) incredibly obscure and undocumented. People who write the packages for Perl, Python have inside information and spend incredible amounts of time researching (aka trial and error).
You could easily spend several lifetimes doing this in shell. For a start, it’s all binary formatted structures, so you will need to od (octal dump) the file to even start parsing the contents, and then doing rather a lot of byte-counting and bit-twiddling lookups, even if you can discover the formats.
Please use the functionality provided by others, and save your sanity.
