[R] there is no "xls" reader in R?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 12:29:58PM -0400, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Just one other thought.   There is a command line program
> called xlHtml that you can find via google that will convert xls files to csv
> and its used like this assuming you have placed it
> somewhere in your path:
> 
>  read.csv(pipe("xlHtml -te -xc:1-10 -csv myfile.xls"))
> 
> Its handy since its just a single file and in the situation that there is junk
> on the first few lines of the spreadsheet you could use the skip= argument
> to read.csv to skip over that.   I don't think the RODBC approach can
> handle that.

An equivalent approach has long been available in Greg Warnes gregmisc
bundle via the gdata package.  It uses Perl's SpreadSheet::ParseExcel --
which it even embeds in the R package -- to parse xls, and creates a csv
which is then read. 

Cross-platform, which RODBC's approach isn't, and available directly via
install.packages().

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison