TITLE

XLSperl - use Perl "one-liners" with Microsoft Excel files

DESCRIPTION
Background
Perl "one-liners" have a great many uses for quick data processing tasks, often replacing the UNIX tools "grep", "sed", and "awk". For example, a simple "grep" function can be written as:

perl -lne '/pattern/ and print' file.txt

which improves on the standard "grep" function by allowing the extended features of Perl regular expressions to be used.

However, this form of processing is only suitable for data that can be read (or needs to be written) in plain text format. XLSperl lets you use the same commands to process and create Microsoft Excel files, e.g. the following command will "grep" an Excel document:

XLSperl -lne '/pattern/ and print' file.xls

Usage
Basic usage of XLSperl is as follows:

XLSperl [options] -e 'perl_code' file1.xls file2.xls ... fileX.xls

Additionally Microsoft Excel files can be piped in to XLSperl

cat file.xls | XLSperl [options] -e 'perl_code'

Options
Options to XLSperl mirror the standard options to "perl" - for full usage details please read the XLSperl manpage (perldoc XLSperl) after installation.

INSTALLATION

To install XLSperl, use the standard Perl module installation procedure:

     perl Makefile.PL
     make
     make test
     make install

XLSperl requires the following modules to be installed:

     Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
     Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Simple
     Variable::Alias

Note that binary packages for Windows, Linux x86, and Mac OSX (Intel) are available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/xlstools

SEE ALSO

XLSperl homepage - <http://perl.jonallen.info/xlstools> Excel on the Command Line talk slides - <http://perl.jonallen.info/talks>
Minimal Perl by Tim Maher - <http://minimalperl.com>

AUTHOR

Written by Jon Allen <jj@jonallen.info>

COPYRIGHT and LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2007-2008 Jon Allen

This software is licensed under the terms of the Artistic License version 2.0.

For full license details, please read the file 'artistic-2_0.txt' included with this distribution, or see http://www.perlfoundation.org/legal/licenses/artistic-2_0.html