excel sheet as attachment

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

Hello everybody,
I have a form that works with a cgi-handler in perl
It emails the data that people fill in. Now I want to receive that data directly in a excel-sheet and emailed to me.
Is this possible? And how do you do it?

cheers & happy holidays!
Knudde Günther
this is my code in the cgi handler

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Copyright 2004 Boutell.Com, Inc. Compatible with our earlier C progr
+am.
use CGI;

my $sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";
my $emailConfPath = "nieuwsbrief.conf";
my $query = new CGI;
my $recipient = &clean($query->param('recipient'));
my $subject = &clean($query->param('subject'));
my $nieuwsbriefnaam = &clean($query->param('nieuwsbriefnaam'));
my $nieuwsbriefemail = &clean($query->param('nieuwsbriefemail'));

if (($nieuwsbriefnaam eq "") || ($nieuwsbriefemail eq ""))
{
&error("Email Rejected",
"Please fill out all fields provided. Back up to the " .
"previous page to try again.");
}
if (!open(IN, "$emailConfPath")) {
&error("Configuration Error",
"The file $emailConfPath does not exist or cannot be " .
"opened. Please read the documentation before installing " .
"email.cgi.");
}
my $returnpage;

my $ok = 0;
while (1) {
my $recipientc = <IN>;
$recipientc =~ s/\s+$//;
if ($recipientc eq "") {
last;
}
my $returnpagec = <IN>;
$returnpagec =~ s/\s+$//;
if ($returnpagec eq "") {
last;
}
if ($recipientc eq $recipient) {
$ok = 1;
$returnpage = $returnpagec;
last;
}
}
close(IN);
if (!$ok) {
&error("Email Rejected",
"The requested destination address is not one of " .
"the permitted email recipients. Please read the " .
"documentation before installing email.cgi.");
}
# Open a pipe to the sendmail program
open(OUT, "|$sendmail -t");
# Use the highly convenient <<EOM notation to include the message
# in this script more or less as it will actually appear
print OUT <<EOM
To: $recipient
Subject: $nieuwsbriefnaam $subject
Reply-To: $email
Supposedly-From: $name

$nieuwsbriefnaam $subject
Naam: $nieuwsbriefnaam
Emailadres: $nieuwsbriefemail

EOM
;
close(OUT);
# Now redirect to the appropriate "landing" page for this recipient.


print $query->redirect($returnpage);
exit 0;

sub clean
{
# Clean up any leading and trailing whitespace
# using regular expressions.
my $s = shift @_;
$s =~ s/^\s+//;
$s =~ s/\s+$//;
return $s;
}
sub error
{
# Output a valid HTML page as an error message
my($title, $content) = @_;
print $query->header;
print <<EOM
<html>
<head>
<title>$title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 align="center">$title</h1>
<p>
$content
</p>
EOM
;
exit 0;
}
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Comment on excel sheet as attachment Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: excel sheet as attachment by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 21, 2009 at 15:38 UTC
That's easy. Create your data as Excel sheet via Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and then attach it to the mail you send via MIME::Lite.	[reply]
Re: excel sheet as attachment by Sinistral (Monsignor) on Dec 21, 2009 at 15:43 UTC
Although it isn't incorrect to hand craft e-mail (even with attachments), it's much easier if you let someone else worry about the niggling details. I recommend you use Email::MIME to do the construction, print it as a string, then send that to your invocation to Sendmail. You specifically want to send an attachment that's an Excel compatible file. The very simplest is to make a CSV file and set the MIME type to text/csv. Excel will handle that gracefully when the recipient gets the e-mail using their favorite e-mail client. If you want to go more advanced, then Spreadsheet::WriteExcel will give you the ability to create an actual binary Excel file that can be attached as the MIME type application/vnd.ms-excel.	[reply]
Re: excel sheet as attachment by knudde (Initiate) on Dec 22, 2009 at 12:42 UTC
Hello Corion and Sinistral, I don't see a start to change the source code. I have more experience with c and java but to perl I'm a newbie... Can you give a little example... Thank you! Happy holidays! Knudde Günther	[reply]
Re^2: excel sheet as attachment by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Dec 22, 2009 at 14:41 UTC
Here are a simple CGI example and a email attachement example from the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel docs. -- John.	[reply]
Re^3: excel sheet as attachment by knudde (Initiate) on Dec 23, 2009 at 16:40 UTC
Thanks John, i'll give it a try! Knudde	[reply]