making cells blank in and excel sheet using perl - perl

Question

I have an excel sheet to which I need to empty some cells
So far this is what it looks like:
I open the sheet, and check for cells not empty in column M.
I add those cells to my array mistake
and then I would like to make black all those cells and save the file (this step not working), as that file needs to be the input to anotherprogram/
thanks!
$infile = $ARGV[0];
$columns = ReadData($infile) or die "cannot open excel table\n\n";
print "xls sheet contains $columns->[1]{maxrow} rows\n";
my $xlsstartrow;
if ( getExcel( A . 1 ) ne "text" ) {
$xlsstartrow = 2;
}
else
{
$xlsstartrow = 4;
}
check_templates();
print "done";
sub check_templates {
for ( $row = $xlsstartrow ; $row < ( $columns->[1]{maxrow} + 1 ) ; $row++ ) {
if (getExcel(M . $row) ne "" ){
$cell = "M" . $row ;
push(#mistakes,$cell);
}
}
rewritesheet(#mistakes);
}
sub rewritesheet {
my $FileName = $infile;
my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser->new();
my $template = $parser->Parse($FileName);
my $worksheet = $template->worksheet(0);
my $row = 0;
my $col = 0;
# Get the format from the cell
my $format = $template->{Worksheet}[$sheet]
->{Cells}[$row][$col]
->{FormatNo};
foreach (#mistakes){
$worksheet->AddCell( $_, "" );
}
$template->SaveAs($infile2);`

Answer 1

Empty column values in an Excel sheet and save the result?
If the whole purpose of your program is to delete all column M values from a .xls file, then the following program (adopted from your program) will do exactly that:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser;
my $infile = $ARGV[0];
(my $infile2 = $infile) =~ s/(\.xls)$/_2$1/;
my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::SaveParser->new();
my $workbook = $parser->Parse($infile);
my $sheet = $workbook->worksheet(0);
print "xls sheet contains rows \[0 .. $sheet->{MaxRow}\]\n";
my $startrow = $sheet->get_cell(0, 0) eq 'text' ? 4-1 : 2-1;
my $col_M = ord('M') - ord('A');
for my $row ($startrow .. $sheet->{MaxRow}) {
my $c = $sheet->get_cell($row, $col_M);
if(defined $c && length($c->value) > 0) { # why check?
$sheet->AddCell($row, $col_M, undef) # delete value
}
}
$workbook->SaveAs($infile2);
print "done";
But, if you really want to clear out column M only, why would you test for values? You could just overwrite them without test. Maybe thats not all your program is required to perform? I don't know.
Regards
rbo