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 - *Excel on the Command Line* talk slides - *Minimal Perl* by Tim Maher - AUTHOR Written by Jon Allen 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