Accessing .xml files through rubyzip

[Graham Stokes]

Hi,

Can anyone please suggest an approach for handling a .zip archive which
contains .xls files ? I want to process the .xls files in turn on the
fly as win32OLE objects to extract cell data and create new charts. Of
course I can do it the long way and just unzip everything first, but I
wonder if there is a neat way of marrying the ZIP and win32OLE objects
so that I can process a directory of zipped and unzipped files "in-line"
so the code doesn't have to break stride to uncompress things. Any ideas
greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Graham Stokes

 

[vasudevram]

Hi,

Can anyone please suggest an approach for handling a .zip archive which
contains .xls files ? I want to process the .xls files in turn on the
fly as win32OLE objects to extract cell data and create new charts. Of
course I can do it the long way and just unzip everything first, but I
wonder if there is a neat way of marrying the ZIP and win32OLE objects
so that I can process a directory of zipped and unzipped files "in-line"
so the code doesn't have to break stride to uncompress things. Any ideas
greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Graham Stokes

Check the Ruby standard libraries. I know this is possible in Python -
reading a zip file on the fly and processing its contents. Saw a recipe
for it in the Python Cookbook. Something similar is likely to be there
in Ruby's libs. Try checking the Ruby Cookbook too - both the official
one from O'Reilly, and Ryan Davis' (incomplete) one at zenspider.com.

HTH
Vasudev
----------------------------------------------------
Vasudev Ram
Software consulting and training
Dancing Bison Enterprises
http://www.dancingbison.com
"Now creating PDFs from Python is even easier"
- Steve Holden
http://del.icio.us/steve.holden/pdf
----------------------------------------------------

 

[Chilkat Software]

My questions would be:

1) Assuming you have the .xls file in-memory, how do you load it
into the win32OLE object and what format does the data have to be in-memory?
In other words: do you need a VARIANT or a byte array/"string"?

2) Forgetting about the zip issue for a moment: is it even possible to load
a .xls into an Excel win32OLE object from memory or must it first be written
to a file?

I don't have these answers, but answering these questions is what you first
need to do...

-Matt


At 08:00 AM 11/5/2006, you wrote: