Converting Microsoft Excel sheet (XLS file) to a Comma Separated file (CSV) is relatively very easy while using an Office product, but it could be a tedious task for programmers to do it in command line. The situation may arrive when you have a XLS file and you need to fill the database from it after formatting the data.

Attempting to convert excel.xls files to.csv format on Mac OS X? If so, you will need a Mac Excel XLS to CSV converter. This blog post guides you through the process of changing XLS files to CSV format on Mac platform via using a good XLS to CSV Converter app for Apple. Oct 30, 2011  XLS2CSV Converter is an application that is capable of converting a batch of Microsoft Office Excel files to comma-delimited files without the need for. Enter to Search.

Converting the XLS to CSV is the ideal way here as the CSV is the format that can easily be manipulated in any language, be it Shell, Perl, Ruby, Python or Java. In this post, we will see the best ways to convert the XLS file to CSV and we will also discuss the pro and cons of using these methods. Catdoc (in C) The first command line tool we are going to talk about is. The tool is written in C by V.B. 1.1 How to install it. Xls2csv -x 'Path_of_Your_XLS_File' -s cp1252 -d 8859- 1 > 'Path_of_Your_CSV_File' Note the option “ -s” and “ -d” (stands for source and destination).

Download XLS2csv for Mac - Simple, but powerful kernel Excel (. Xls) file Export CSV tool Export excle(.xls) to csv very quickly. Support Batch conversion. Support conversion custom options. Preview excle data and select all sheet (or one sheet) are supported. To build catdoc / catppt / xls2csv on Mac OS X (macos). Tested with catdoc-0.95. Configure --with-input=cp1252 --with-output=mac-roman. (if you are more likely.

These options are used to specify which character encoding is used in the source file and what would be the character encoding for the destination file. Here I have used cpl1252 which is Microsoft character encoding and 8859-1 which is used for Western European character encoding. You can use what other options are available by using the help command.

Xls2csv --help 1.3 Pros and Cons: Pros: Straight forward installation Cons: No selective conversion in multiple sheet scenario, it coverts all the sheets present in the xls file (one workaround would be to explicitly specify a footer in each sheet and then use option -b in the command), problems with few European characters, problem with date fields (the date fields are messed up big times), messes with quotes. Xls2csv (in Perl) The second tool we are going to talk about is a Perl script written by Ken Prows in Perl.

2.1 How to install it: Download the script. Gunzip and tar it like we did in previous section and go the extracted directory and use the following commands to install it. Locale::Recode Unicode::Map Spreadsheet::ParseExcel Text::CSV_XS While installing xls2csv, it will give error that the mentioned perl modules have not been installed. It will ask you to download the modules. Download and install these modules when asked. All these module installation requires root privileges.

If you do not have root access, then you should follow the instruction given to install a Perl module. 2.2 How to use it: The following command can be used to convert Microsoft excel to csv.

Background I really would like to search for a term in a directory full of Word docs. So I stumbled across this. However this solution requires that catdoc is installed on mac. What I have tried now homebrew obviously doens't have catdoc: $ brew install catdoc Updating Homebrew. Error: No available formula with the name 'catdoc' > Searching for a previously deleted formula. Error: No previously deleted formula found.

> Searching for similarly named formulae. Error: No similarly named formulae found. > Searching taps. Error: No formulae found in taps.

Xls2csv For Mac

Macports does, but I use homebrew and It's not a to have both on my machine. So I did what any self respecting semi-programmer would do: try to install it from: $./configure see $./make see the last part of./make gives me this 1 warning generated. Gcc -o catppt catppt.o pptparse.o charsets.o substmap.o fileutil.o confutil.o numutils.o ole.o -lm echo '#! /usr/bin/wish' >wordview echo set charset_lib ' '/usr/local/share/catdoc '>>wordview cat wordview.tcl >>wordview chmod 0755 wordview touch build make[1]: Nothing to be done for `all'. Then when i run make install i get this make: `install' is up to date. And obviously catdoc doesn't work: $ which catdoc >> nothing Question How can I install this?

Xls2csv For Mac Pro

To build catdoc / catppt / xls2csv on Mac OS X (macos) tested with catdoc-0.95 on Mac OS X 10.9.5 Configuration First, unless your documents are likely to be written in a Cyrillic language, start with: $./configure --with-input=cp1252 --with-output=mac-roman (if you are more likely to encounter files from Windows). $./configure --with-input=mac-roman --with-output=mac-roman (if you are more likely to encounter files from MacOS) Building $ make all (or just $ make) Installation make --directory=src install; make --directory=doc install; make --directory=charsets install This should compensate for the error you received,.

Dr. cleaner for mac os x 10.6. User interface has also been refined. IChat feature has been enhanced and now it supports greater resolution video chat. Some new wallpapers have also been included in this operating system two of them being of Snow Leopard’s. Finder the default file manager of Mac has been entirely rewritten in Cocoa API. Preview which is Mac’s application for displaying images and PDF files can now deduce the paragraph structure in PDF document. Mac OS X Mountain Lion is another great choice for advanced features.Safari 4 now has built in crash system which can prevent the browser from crashing due to plugins.

What is libxls ?

libxls is a C library which can read Excel (xls) files. It has been tested on Linux x86 and Cygwin but may work on any little-endian system. It is not compatible with big endian systems.

libxls can read excel files since Excel 97 (the BIFF8 format)

libxls cannot write Excel files.

libxls is also shipped with xls2csv, a tool which converts an xls file to a csv format, more suitable for parsing.

The OpenOffice.org's Documentation of the Microsoft Excel File Format and OpenOffice.org's Coumpound Document file format were of much help to correct bugs in libxls.

Download

Current 'stable' version (V0.2.0)

• Source: libxls-0.2.0.tar.gz
• Win32 binary: libxls-0.2.0-win32.tar.gz
• Mac binary: libxls-0.2.0-i386-apple.tar.gz
• Cygwin binary: libxls-0.2.0-cygwin.tar.gz

First release

This version contained a php extension to parse XLS files, not included in the automatic build process, and only distributed as a Windows DLL.
libxls 0.0.1 beta

How to use libxls ?

libxls is a C library, so you need to include the right header files:

You also need to link with libxlsreader.a.

Then you'll need to open an Excel file:

For a good start you could have a look to xls2csv.c.

How to use xls2csv ?

xls2csv takes as its first argument the name of an Excel file. It write to standard output the file converted to csv format.

For example, we can convert the file test.xls into a csv file called test.csv with the following command: xls2csv test.xls > test.csv

Changelog

Current SVN

New features

1. libxls can read Excel formulas results saved in files:
2. New functions xls_row and xls_cell to get cell content. Deprecates the use of direct access to row and cell content.

V0.2.0

Bugs corrected

1. Corrected Cygwin bug when decoding Excel Numbers
2. OLE2 file header id is now checked
3. Corrected wrong fcell usage which could lead to cell moves on a row
4. There was always one more empty cell on the right on each row
5. Some formattings in xls_getfcell where incorrects
6. Corrected some reading problems with SST having CONTINUE records