SPUG: Newbie problem with Win32::OLE

[Adam Monsen]

>In a nutshell, I am importing some text files from Unix, "converting" them
>to .csv files. I then open the .csv files in Excel and "save as" Excel 
>files
>(.xls). The whole thing works great, except that when I open the 
>"converted"
>.xls files, the data is no longer columnar (it is a single line separated 
>by
>commas.
I would recommend Text::CSV_XS for parsing/generating files in csv format. 
Try something like this (# added before each Perl line for clarity):

# #!/usr/bin/perl -w
# use strict;
# use Text::CSV_XS;
# my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new( {always_quote=>1} );
# my @arr = qw(one two three);
# $csv->combine(@arr);
# $line = $csv->string;
# print $line,"\r\n";

Setting always_quote to 1 ensures that every field is quoted, which should 
allow all your Win32 apps to read the csv file.

Your problem may be later on when you save the file in Excel. I have messed 
around with this somewhat, and it appears that different Win32 apps use 
different formats for csv files. For instance, after I saved a file in cvs 
format in Excel 98, it could not be imported as csv by Access 2000.

On a side note, I would be interested if you have read and could point me to 
a spec for csv.

Did that help?

Adam Monsen
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