SPUG: Newbie problem with Win32::OLE

[Johnston, Mark]

I don't know if this might help, but MS Excel can read a file in HTML format and
save it in .XLS format.  If you create an HTML page with the data contained in a
<table>, then give the page a MIME type which the client machine can associate
with MS Excel (Microsoft automagically installs the type
"application/vnd.ms-excel" for Office 97), then that's all you have to do -- and
it bypasses the complication of what the proper CSV format ought to be.

	Sincerely,

	Mark Johnston
	Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
	mailto:mark.johnston at pnl.gov


	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Adam Monsen [SMTP:meonkeys at hotmail.com]
	Sent:	Monday, December 04, 2000 5:57 PM
	To:	traciee at wrq.com; spug-list at pm.org
	Subject:	Re: SPUG: Newbie problem with Win32::OLE

	>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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