# Accessing .xml files through rubyzip

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/accessing-xml-files-through-rubyzip/74347>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 5, 2006, 8:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/accessing-xml-files-through-rubyzip/74347 "2006-11-05T08:38:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsiener)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 8:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/accessing-xml-files-through-rubyzip/74347/1 "2006-11-05T08:38:01Z")

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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

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsiener)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 11:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/accessing-xml-files-through-rubyzip/74347/2 "2006-11-07T11:03:43Z")

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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

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/3ec8ea/32.png) [@gsiener](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsiener)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 11:03am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/accessing-xml-files-through-rubyzip/74347/3 "2006-11-07T11:03:40Z")

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Graham Stokes wrote:

> Regards,
> 
> Graham Stokes
> 
> –  
> Posted via [http://www.ruby-forum.com/](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](http://zenspider.com).

## HTH Vasudev

Vasudev Ram  
Software consulting and training  
Dancing Bison Enterprises

> **[dancingbison.com](http://ww38.dancingbison.com/)**
>
> Learn Python Programming

“Now creating PDFs from Python is even easier”

- Steve H.  
[http://del.icio.us/steve.holden/pdf](http://del.icio.us/steve.holden/pdf)