Hello there. I need to seek the Wisdom of a monk with knowledge of Excel. I'm using the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel ::Simple module to search through a fairly straightforward Excel spreadsheet. The problem comes when I encounter a blank cell. I want to read the contents of the cell into a simple list array, based on whether or not it is empty. If the cell is empty, I want to insert an "X" instead. However, despite stripping the contents of "empty" cells of all whitespace, carriage returns and new line characters, *sometimes* Perl still seems to think there is something in it. If I go into Excel and manually change the font on the empty cells, the problem goes away. Also, the cells that seem to evaluate incorrectly are always the last item in the current row. Any help with this problem would be appreciated. I think it's something to do with an invisible control character evaluating as a non-whitespace character for some reason. Here is a snippet of code: 
$excelfile = "/data/MS/excel/contract_check.xls";

$xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read($excelfile);
@sheets = $xls->sheets;
  
while ($sheets[1]->has_data)
{
  @hsbcdata = ();
  @hsbcdataread = $sheets[1]->next_row; 
  
  foreach $_ (@hsbcdataread)
  {
    s/^\s*//;
    s/\s*\r*$//;
    chomp ($_);

    if (/\S+/)
    {
      push (@hsbcdata, $_);
    }

    else
    {
      push (@hsbcdata, "X"); # 
    }
  }

...

}

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In reply to Perl and Excel by Anonymous Monk

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