convert CSV to XLS file on linux

The following Perl script can convert CSV file to XLS file

the problem is that I need to install on customer Linux machine many Perl modules

in order to run this Perl script , and actually I cant because the Linux machine is customer machine ( not allow to install modules )

So I need to find some other alternative for this Perl script

First customer have Linux red-hat machine version 5.X

And I want to find some bash/ksh/sh/awk scripts that can do the job the same as the perl script do

so I want to find other alternative that convert CSV to XLS file

Please advice how to find this script? or other advice to convert CSV to XLS on Linux machine

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

###############################################################################
#
# Example of how to use the WriteExcel module
#
# Simple program to convert a CSV comma-separated value file to an Excel file.
# This is more or less an non-op since Excel can read CSV files.
# The program uses Text::CSV_XS to parse the CSV.
#
# Usage: csv2xls.pl file.csv newfile.xls
#
#
# NOTE: This is only a simple conversion utility for illustrative purposes.
# For converting a CSV or Tab separated or any other type of delimited
# text file to Excel I recommend the more rigorous csv2xls program that is
# part of H.Merijn Brand's Text::CSV_XS module distro.
#
# See the examples/csv2xls link here:
#     L<http://search.cpan.org/~hmbrand/Text-CSV_XS/MANIFEST>
#
# reverse('©'), March 2001, John McNamara, <a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="244e49474a4549455645644754454a0a4b5643">[email protected]</a>
#

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Text::CSV_XS;

# Check for valid number of arguments
if ( ( $#ARGV < 1 ) || ( $#ARGV > 2 ) ) {
    die("Usage: csv2xls csvfile.txt newfile.xlsn");
}

# Open the Comma Separated Variable file
open( CSVFILE, $ARGV[0] ) or die "$ARGV[0]: $!";

# Create a new Excel workbook
my $workbook  = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new( $ARGV[1] );
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();

# Create a new CSV parsing object
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new;

# Row and column are zero indexed
my $row = 0;

while (<CSVFILE>) {
    if ( $csv->parse($_) ) {
        my @Fld = $csv->fields;

        my $col = 0;
        foreach my $token (@Fld) {
            $worksheet->write( $row, $col, $token );
            $col++;
        }
        $row++;
    } else {
        my $err = $csv->error_input;
        print "Text::CSV_XS parse() failed on argument: ", $err, "n";
    }
}

Answers:

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Method 1

For automatically converting CSV files to XLS/XLSX ones you can also use ssconvert (which comes with Gnumeric) or unoconv (which uses LibreOffice).

SSConvert Example

$ echo -e 'surname,name,agenCarlo,Smith,23nJohn,Doe,46nJane,Doe,69nSarah,Meyer,23n' 
     > example.csv
$ unix2dos example.csv
$ ssconvert example.csv example.xlsx
$ ssconvert example.csv example.xls

Where the first ssconvert call creates a MS Excel 2007/2010 file and the second an old school Excel 2007 one.

You can check the files via file:

$ file example.csv
example.csv: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
$ file example.xls
example.xls: Composite Document File V2 Document, Little Endian, Os: Windows, Version 4.10,
   Code page: 1252, Create Time/Date: Tue Sep 30 20:23:18 2014
$ file example.xlsx 
example.xlsx: Microsoft Excel 2007+

You can list all supported output file formats via:

$ ssconvert --list-exporters
ID                           | Description
[..]
Gnumeric_Excel:xlsx2         | ISO/IEC 29500:2008 & ECMA 376 2nd edition (2008);
                               [MS Excel™ 2010]
Gnumeric_Excel:xlsx          | ECMA 376 1st edition (2006); [MS Excel™ 2007]
Gnumeric_Excel:excel_dsf     | MS Excel™ 97/2000/XP & 5.0/95
Gnumeric_Excel:excel_biff7   | MS Excel™ 5.0/95
Gnumeric_Excel:excel_biff8   | MS Excel™ 97/2000/XP
[..]

Unoconv Example

$ unoconv --format  xls example.csv

which creates example.xls, which is a Excel 97/2000/XP file.

Check via file:

$ file example.xls 
example.xls: Composite Document File V2 Document, Little Endian, Os: Windows, Version 1.0,
  Code page: -535, Revision Number: 0

You can list all supported file formats via:

$ unoconv --show
[..]
The following list of spreadsheet formats are currently available:

  csv      - Text CSV [.csv]
  dbf      - dBASE [.dbf]
[..]
  ooxml    - Microsoft Excel 2003 XML [.xml]
[..]
  xls      - Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP [.xls]
  xls5     - Microsoft Excel 5.0 [.xls]
  xls95    - Microsoft Excel 95 [.xls]
[..]

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0