How do I read the content of an Excel spreadsheet using Ruby?

Question

I am trying to read an Excel spreadsheet file with Ruby, but it is not reading the content of the file.

This is my script

book = Spreadsheet.open 'myexcel.xls';
sheet1 = book.worksheet 0
sheet1.each do |row|
  puts row.inspect ;
  puts row.format 2; 
  puts row[1]; 
  exit;
end

It is giving me the following:

[DEPRECATED] By requiring 'parseexcel', 'parseexcel/parseexcel' and/or
             'parseexcel/parser' you are loading a Compatibility layer which
             provides a drop-in replacement for the ParseExcel library. This
             code makes the reading of Spreadsheet documents less efficient and
             will be removed in Spreadsheet version 1.0.0

#<Spreadsheet::Excel::Row:0xffffffdbc3e0d2 @worksheet=#<Spreadsheet::Excel::Worksheet:0xb79b8fe0> @outline_level=0 @idx=0 @hidden=false @height= @default_format= @formats= []>
#<Spreadsheet::Format:0xb79bc8ac>
nil

I need to get the actual content of file. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It looks like row, whose class is Spreadsheet::Excel::Row is effectively an Excel Range and that it either includes Enumerable or at least exposes some enumerable behaviours, #each, for example.

So you might rewrite your script something like this:

require 'spreadsheet'    
book = Spreadsheet.open('myexcel.xls')
sheet1 = book.worksheet('Sheet1') # can use an index or worksheet name
sheet1.each do |row|
  break if row[0].nil? # if first cell empty
  puts row.join(',') # looks like it calls "to_s" on each cell's Value
end

Note that I've parenthesised arguments, which is generally advisable these days, and removed the semi-colons, which are not necessary unless you're writing multiple statement on a line (which you should rarely - if ever - do).

It's probably a hangover from a larger script, but I'll point out that in the code given the book and sheet1 variables aren't really needed, and that Spreadsheet#open takes a block, so a more idiomatic Ruby version might be something like this:

require 'spreadsheet'    
Spreadsheet.open('MyTestSheet.xls') do |book|
  book.worksheet('Sheet1').each do |row|
    break if row[0].nil?
    puts row.join(',')
  end
end