Reading excel files from c language

rajesh_b · 11-24-2004, 06:44 AM

Hi,

In the part of my project i have to read excel files and parse them. But i dont know how to read excel files . Is there any special libraries needed or it can be done with normail file i/o available in c progaramming language. Any ideas regarding how can start and approach.

thankx in advance,
rajesh.

jlliagre · 11-24-2004, 08:43 AM

Excel (xls) file format is pretty proprietary, I guess you'll find in Open Office source code what you need.
A simple way would be to have Excel save its data in csv or sylk format, that are easier to parse.

quarry_06 · 11-24-2004, 03:05 PM

if you are using windoze, which I guess you're not

, you could use COM Libraries
I haven't used these but a friend of mine has been doing this. (c++ % com)

or is there something like com for linux?

but using csv is cetainly the better alternative and a lot faster. (com is purty slow)

rajesh_b · 11-25-2004, 03:35 AM

I m not using windows. I have googled but i did not find enough information on how excel file is stored. It is very important to know how the file is stored. Actually what i m doing is that "reading excel file and transform them into csv files and it is the csv file data that is inserted into the mysql database".

If any body have the idea of excel file storage tell me . It would be lot more useful to me.

thankx in advance,
rajesh

jlliagre · 11-25-2004, 06:26 AM

If you are brave enough, read the ~200 pages describing excel file format at http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf and then write you own code ...

Otherwise, why not reusing OpenOffice.org open source code, through its SDK:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/sdk/ ?

You can also find other XLS resources at:
http://chicago.sourceforge.net/devel/docs/excel/