How to convert a xls file to csv?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
My requirement is to convert the xls to csv file with utf-8 conversion.
Is there any way please suggest me.

Thanks,
Raja

2

Open in Excel, export as CSV? it may not end up in quite the right character set but you could convert that with commandline tools after.

Otherwise you're looking at doing everything with the Perl excel-loading modules and I've got no idea how character sets would be handled with that.

3

Hi cnraja,

If you want to try with perl modules as mentioned by Corona688, take a look here:

Regards

4

There is also a utility 'xls2csv' that does the job nicely. Its part of package 'catdoc' and should be in a repository of most popular distros.
on RH variants:

sudo yum install catdoc
xls2csv myExcelSpreadsheet.xls > converted.csv
5

Here is the perl code to parse Excel.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $sourcename = shift @ARGV or die "invocation: $0 <source file>\n";
my $source_excel = new Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
my $source_book = $source_excel->Parse($sourcename) or die "Could not open source Excel file $sourcename: $!";
my $storage_book;

foreach my $source_sheet_number (0 .. $source_book->{SheetCount}-1)
{
 my $source_sheet = $source_book->{Worksheet}[$source_sheet_number];

 print "--------- SHEET:", $source_sheet->{Name}, "\n";

 next unless defined $source_sheet->{MaxRow};
 next unless $source_sheet->{MinRow} <= $source_sheet->{MaxRow};
 next unless defined $source_sheet->{MaxCol};
 next unless $source_sheet->{MinCol} <= $source_sheet->{MaxCol};

 foreach my $row_index ($source_sheet->{MinRow} .. $source_sheet->{MaxRow})
 {
  foreach my $col_index ($source_sheet->{MinCol} .. $source_sheet->{MaxCol})
  {
   my $source_cell = $source_sheet->{Cells}[$row_index][$col_index];
   if ($source_cell)
   {
    #print "( $row_index , $col_index ) =>", $source_cell->Value, "\t";
    print  $source_cell->Value, "\t";
   }
  } 
  print "\n";
 } 
}
print "done!\n";