Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes

viffer has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

G'day all. I've run out of fingers (and patience) using google..
you're my last hope.
Probably should have been my first.. I'm reading a spreadsheet that contains bullet points in the cell.
For some reason the bullet points are being converted to speech quotation marks. Is there any way I can maintain the integrity of the data so that when I print the cell contents the bullet points are still there?
I push the spreadsheet cells into an array @arr, but when I look at the contents of @arr the bullet points are now speech marks.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

    my $spreadsheet_csv;
    open ( $spreadsheet_csv, '<', $LOOKUP_FILE );
    
    my $fname = $LOOKUP_FILE;

    my $excel = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse($fname);
    my @arr = ();

    my $sheet = $excel->{Worksheet}[0];
    foreach my $row ($sheet->{MinRow} .. $sheet->{MaxRow}) {
        foreach my $col ($sheet->{MinCol} ..  $sheet->{MaxCol}) {
            my $cell = $sheet->{Cells}[$row][$col];

            if (exists $cell->{Val}) {
                push @arr,$cell->{Val};
            }
            else {
                $cell->{Val} = '';
                push @arr,$cell->{Val};
            }
        }
    }
[download]

Comment on Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes by kcott (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2014 at 02:58 UTC
G'day viffer, Some additional information would be helpful. What is the format of your spreadsheet: `.xls`: Use of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel suggests this; however, your code doesn't look like the documented code for that module. For example, you have `$cell->{Val}` but the documented equivalent would appear to be `$cell->value()`. `.xlsx`: If so, Spreadsheet::XLSX would be a better choice of module. Curiously, your code does look like the documented code for this module, e.g. the documentation shows `$cell->{Val}` which mirrors your posted code. `.csv`: Seems unlikely but `$spreadsheet_csv` in your code looks dubious. It's somewhat unclear exactly what conversion is taking place. Is your '`• content`' being converted to '`" content`', '`"content"`', or something else. A link to a minimal sample of your input file, as well as showing us (a representative part of) the contents of `@arr`, would be useful. The documentation for Spreadsheet::ParseExcel would suggest that $cell->unformatted() might be appropriate; however, the source code for that method shows: `sub unformatted { my $self = shift; return $self->{Val}; }` [download] It's entirely possible that by ignoring the published interface, and circumventing the OO encapsulation, that you've caused some problem(s) which may be hard to track down. Anyway, once you've supplied the information requested above, we may have a better idea. -- Ken	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 03, 2014 at 02:15 UTC
I'm guessing that your xls spreadsheet file contains some Unicode characters to convey the bulletpoints. You might want to check out this script I posted here a while back: xls2tsv. It turns out that Unicode characters in Excel spreadsheets are encoded using UTF-16BE (who knows why…), so once you decode them into utf8, it should look as expected.	[reply]