Accessing .xml files through rubyzip

Ruby
1

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

2

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

3

Graham Stokes wrote:

Regards,

Graham Stokes

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

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 D.’ (incomplete) one at zenspider.com.

HTH
Vasudev

Vasudev Ram
Software consulting and training
Dancing Bison Enterprises

“Now creating PDFs from Python is even easier”