Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser

I use the script below, which uses the excellent Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package (available through ppm) on my web server to render Excel spreadsheets to my intranet. It does a much better job than MS-Office, because it produces clean HTML, and can be customised heavily to effectively use the spreadsheets as the database to drive customised web pages.

The parameters to the script are excelFile=xx.xls, where xx.xls resides in the c:/inetpub/wwwroot/ directory on an IIS server.

#!d:\perl\bin\perl.exe

use strict;
use Time::gmtime;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $excelFile='c:/inetpub/wwwroot/' . param('excelFile');
my $title=$excelFile;

my $oExcel = new Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
my $oBook = $oExcel->Parse($excelFile);
my($iR, $iC, $oWkS, $oWkC);

printHeader();
printBody();

sub printSpreadsheet()
{
    my $startpage = 0;

    print "<h1>FILE  :", $oBook->{File} , "<h1>\n";

    for(my $iSheet=0; 
        $iSheet < $oBook->{SheetCount} ; 
        $iSheet++) {

        $oWkS = $oBook->{Worksheet}[$iSheet];
        if($oBook->{SheetCount} gt 1)
        {
            print h1($oWkS->{Name});
        }
        print "<table border=0 cellpadding=1 width=100% ";
        print "BGCOLOR='#808080' width=100%>\n";
        for(my $iR = $oWkS->{MinRow} ;
            defined $oWkS->{MaxRow} && $iR <= $oWkS->{MaxRow} ; $iR++)
+ {
            print "<tr>\n";
            for(my $iC = $oWkS->{MinCol} ;
                defined $oWkS->{MaxCol} && $iC <= $oWkS->{MaxCol} ; 
                $iC++) {
                $oWkC = $oWkS->{Cells}[$iR][$iC];
                if($oWkC)
                {
                    print "<td bgcolor=\'";
                    print $oExcel->ColorIdxToRGB($oWkC->{Format}->{Fil
+l}[1]),"\'>\n";
                    if ($iR eq 0 or $iC eq 0)
                    {
                        print "<b>";
                    }
                    if ($oWkC->Value ne '')
                    {
                        print toHtml($oWkC->Value), "\n";
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        print "&nbsp;";
                    }
                    if($iC == 2 && $iR gt 1)
                    {
                        print "</a>";
                    }
                    print "</td>\n";
                }
                else
                {
                    print "<td bgcolor='#C9C7BA'>&nbsp;</td>\n";
                }
            }
            print "</tr>\n";
        }
        print "</table>\n";
    }
}

#########################################################

sub printHeader
{
    print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
    print "<html><head>\n";
    print "<title>", $title, "</title>";
    print "<LINK rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' ";
    print "href='http://localhost/styles.css'>\n";
    print "<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>\n";
    print "    function linkURL(thisURL)\n";
    print "    { \n";
    print "      var re = / /g;\n";
    print "      var newThisURL = thisURL.replace(re, \"%20\"); \n";
    print "      window.location =newThisURL; \n";
    print "    }\n";
    print "</SCRIPT>\n";
    print "</head>\n";
    print "<body bgcolor='#FFFFFF'>\n";
}

#########################################################

sub printBody()
{
    printSpreadsheet();
    print "x</body>\n";
    print "</html>\n";
}

#########################################################

sub toHtml()
{
    local ($_) = @_;

    s/&/&amp;/g;
    s/>/&gt;/g;
    s/</&lt;/g;
    # etc...
    return $_;
}
[download]

Comment on Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(jeffa) Re: Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser by jeffa (Bishop) on Jul 03, 2003 at 15:01 UTC
That's not the cleanest code i have seen (no strict, variables that are used without first being initialized), but it's a decent first attempt, and the results look really good. Here is a more consise approach - i'll skip trying to format the output to look like Excel's, but i think you will appreciate the 'lack of code' ;) `use strict; use warnings; use CGI qw(:standard); use DBIx::XHTML_Table; my $file = '/path/to/foo.xls'; my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:Excel:file=$file",undef,undef,{RaiseErro +r=>1}); my $table = DBIx::XHTML_Table->new($dbh); my $sheet = ($dbh->tables)[0]; $table->exec_query("select * from $sheet"); print header, $table->output;` [download] jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Jul 03, 2003 at 16:26 UTC
For anyone who is interested, it is also worth having a look at the xlHtml Excel to Html converter. There is even a CPAN module that interfaces with it: Spreadsheet::ParseExcel_XLHTML -- John.	[reply]
Re: Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser by bart (Canon) on Jul 08, 2003 at 15:16 UTC
`print $oWkC->Value, "\n";` [download] Tsk. You haven't html-escaped the values. What if your text contains one of the no-no characters, in particular "<" and "&"? When producing HTML, always escape the text. Always.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Rendering Clean MS-Excel Spreadsheets to a Browser by emarsee (Acolyte) on Jul 10, 2003 at 00:30 UTC
Done - there's also the matter of replacing \013 linefeeds with html breaks, but I've skipped that for now.	[reply]


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