Perl has its own C API for extensions called XS. You'd have to implement this from the Pascal side to call perl modules (not to mention the rest of the Perl C API that the module might call). What would be more likely to be a workable solution would be to write a C extension that creates a perl interpreter and link against that from your Pascal (and then you could send perl code from your pascal to load the module and do all the xls mucking). See perldoc perlembed for more details.

Cheers - L~R

Instead of "hard" (in-process) linking which is segfault prone and hard to do right the first time, I would suggest splitting the Perl job into a separate process. There are at least two ways to do this:

• Write your spreadsheet formatter as a separate Perl program and feed it data through standard input (see perldoc perlopentut or the IPC modules). You need too define an unobfuscated data representation format ; XML might help.
• Make your Pascal program write code "on the fly" into a string, and then feed it to the Perl interpreter. This might be easier to prototype, but less consistent and harder to debug.

Update: braino - Perl code is the callee, not the caller, so the doc pointers are not immediately relevant. Good material for reading, though.

If you need to create an Excel file with formatting and formulas then there are easier alternatives such as creating a HTML file or an XML file.

Excel can read HTML tables and it preserves the cell formatting and interpolates any formulas in the text. It will read anything from a very simple <table> structures to its own HTML format.

See Two-dimensional array to "Excel" format for an example.

The XML format used by Excel 2002 and later is called SpreadsheetML and the specification and schemas are available here. The XML format is relatively easy to handle. The Spreadsheet::WriteExcelXML module uses this approach.

As an aside, I wrote Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and as it happens I wrote one of its simpler precursors in Pascal. :-)

--
John.

> As an aside, I wrote Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and as it happens I wrote one of its simpler precursors in Pascal. :-)

Could you show me some code? I was reading all the MS specifications on excel files (BIFF, XML, etc.), and I figured out that the worst work is to write all the headers, data structures and constants. With all this stuff in my hand, it would be easy to port SpreadSheet::WriteExcel back to Pascal.

I use the freepascal compiler. A unit similar to Spread... would be a useful contribution.

my email is inpromptu at operamail dot com

FYI -- you can download his code from CPAN (see search.cpan.org or perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'), without asking for it... it's pretty easy, try it out!

Um, www.gnupascal.com is a bogus name.

Perhaps you mean http://www.gnu-pascal.de/gpc/index-orig.html?

I've tried gnupascal, but sometimes i need to look inside the source code. And theres is the problem with gnupascal: it is written in C, not Pascal. FPC is written in Pascal, and compiled with FPC, so, the development, workarounds and patches are easier to write on FPC. By the way... is it possible to write Perl in Perl ?

All your suggestions are useful. All of them are good approaches. I think that the perldoc and perlembed are the right starting point. Nevertheless, I would try to work around the others solutions.

Thank you !