Fellow monks, I have a problem that isn't necessarily a Perl problem, so much as it manifests itself when I'm using Perl, and I'm hoping that there may be a relatively painless Perl solution.

For many years I've been getting monthly data files in Excel from a little company in Seattle. For years I've parsed them into a database, using first Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, then as the format changed using Spreadsheet::XLSX, and more recently using Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX. And despite the changes from .xls to .xlsx and a few format changes, things have been mostly good.

Some time around a year ago the format didn't change, but the Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX stopped reading the file correctly. Or maybe more accurately, whoever wrote the file stopped writing it correctly, and now Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX doesn't read it correctly. The particular issue where it first manifests is in reading a cell with "Month Year" in the contents (e.g. "December 2023"). When I read the cell with

 my $mycell=$worksheet->get_cell();

and then try to evaluate it with either 

my $value=$mycell->value(); # or
my $unformatted=$mycell->unformatted();

[download]

it returns "0" or "0.0" respectively. The catch is that if I simply open the file in Excel and hit "save", or open it in Apple's Numbers and export it back to XLSX, it then parses correctly, like it always used to. So the Excel file opener is fairly forgiving of whatever changed, but Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX isn't, and I don't see an obvious way to get at the content to debug. Using Data::Dumper on $mycell also shows zeros where it should give the month and year. I haven't tried other cells - once it barfs, I remember I have to open/save and that presumably fixes all the cells.

This is something I can live with if I have to, since I only have to deal with the files a few times a year and can just open/save them quickly, but it seems so wrong. I'm not sure it's a widespread problem - someone else is writing the file using a program other than Excel so I can read it with a program other than Excel. The smart thing would be if the generator produced CSV, but that's not something I can influence.

In reply to Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX returning zero by bitingduck

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