"...I found it gave a lot of warnings for empty cells and it did not even handle the utf-8 euro symbol at all"

Emphasis mine. From rt://40061:

'The Euro symbol isn't stored in Excel as a single character. It is stored as a UTF-16 character and is returned by Spreadsheet::ParseExcel as a Perl utf8 character.'

'This is what you are seeing and in terms of the way Spreadsheet::ParseExcel handles Unicode it is the correct behaviour.'

'How you should handle the utf8 string from there depends on what you want to do with it.'

further on..

"I've come to the conclusion the there is no great solution for parsing Excel files with Perl. That makes me sad. "

If you are saddened by what is available, extend what's there or write your own. Alternatively Spreadsheet::Read:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

use Spreadsheet::Read;
use open ':std', ':encoding(UTF-8)';

my $book  = ReadData('euro.xlsx');
my $cell  = $book->[1]{A1};

say $cell;

[download]

Output:

€40

[download]

In reply to Re^3: Looking for assistance for proper fix for Spreadsheet::XLSX bug(?) by marto
in thread Looking for assistance for proper fix for Spreadsheet::XLSX bug(?) by nysus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.